Greetings

I couldn't believe it when I saw an ad in a magazine from a greeting card company promoting something called "Friendship Day." Send a card to a friend, the ad urged. Tell him what a good friend he is and how happy you are to be his friend.

Good grief, Charlie Brown, why can't these card companies leave us alone? If you have a friend, and each of you knows you're friends, why in the world do you have to send a card telling him or her that you're friends? "Dear Ralph the Rattler, you low-down sneaky viper. Let me hug you, because you're my friend!"

Please, give me a break. These card hustlers are forever dreaming up new holidays or events to suck more money out of us. Grandparent's Day, Sweetest Day, Harvest Day, Brother-in-Law Day, and that perennial favorite, Eat More Zucchini Day. Pretty soon they'll have a holiday for every day of the year. And the prices they charge now! Four or five bucks for a little folded piece of cardboard that must cost them at least 3 cents to make.

What happened to the good old days? You know, when they had only eight baseball teams in each league, eight boxing divisions, and eight holidays: New Year's Day, Presidents' Day, Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Chanukah, Halloween, and Groundhog Day. Why are people always trying to complicate our lives just to make a buck?

But then I thought: Maybe there's a way that I could cash in on this racket too by selling special-occasion greeting cards for poker players. So, I put my awesome creative talent to work, and here are some of the greetings I came up with. I started with a Bad-Beat Day, when all those irksome whiners could put their complaints on paper and mail them out to the whole waiting world. Here's one poetry sample:

I had my aces cracked last year,

A hundred forty times.

The only things I won with it

Were some antes and the blinds.

Pretty cool, huh? OK, now how about a Railbird Day? The railbirds could send out annual contribution envelopes with this greeting:

My kind friend, can you stake me?

I'm bound for cash and fame.

No matter which event I play,

It's always my best game.

And how about Tourist Day to honor all those idiots who always make impossible drawouts on pros like me? You're not allowed to berate them at the table and risk driving them away. In any case, they wouldn't even know what you're talking about because they don't even know that they're tourists. Once, after some amateur made a 5,000-1 suck-out on me, I said sarcastically to him, "You're a tourist, aren't you?"

"Oh, no," he answered brightly. "I'm a Libra."

Anyway, what you do is use some pretext to get his business card (all tourists have business cards; they actually work for a living), then mail him this Tourist Day greeting card:

The way that you play poker,

You should hide your head in the sand.

There's just one question I want to ask:

HOW COULD YOU PLAY THAT HAND?!

I'm telling you, I'm going to get rich off this thing. Let's see, there's something called Secretaries' Day, so how about Dealers' Day to honor poker dealers? (I could get rich off this just selling these cards to John Bonetti.)

You're my favorite dealer.

I think of you a lot.

You love to burn and turn too soon

And make me lose the pot.

And if we have a Dealers' Day, we should certainly have a Floormans' Day as well.

Dear floorman, sir, I wish that I

Could give you more respect.

So try to make one decision

That's even remotely correct.

How about smokers? Those poor souls are a dying breed (literally as well as figuratively), as one by one their venues are being snuffed out: airplanes, theaters, elevators, even – believe it or not – hospital operating rooms. And now their last haunts, cardrooms, are under assault. Tobacco companies once thought up a sleazy rallying cry: "Smoker's rights." (The right to make other people breathe in secondhand smoke?) Well, OK, I'll sell cards to anyone, so here's one holiday that smoking poker players can embrace: Poker Smoker's Rights Day.

Players, rally 'round the flag,

And fight for the right to smoke,

Who cares what you do to the guys next to you,

Let them gasp, let them cough, let them choke.

I could go on like this forever, but since I don't get paid by the word, why bother? So, let me finish with one final category. I belong to a small but elite cadre of dedicated, talented, hard-working poker writers who are hired by casinos to do daily tournament write-ups. We dedicated, talented, hard-working writers drive ourselves to exhaustion staying up all night to do these daily reports and put them on the Internet. Sad to say, it is a little-known and lamentable fact that we dedicated, talented, hard-working writers do not share in the general toke pool and must depend on the kindness of winners for our livelihoods. So, I would like to designate a Poker Writers' Day, when we could send out cards to tournament players who cash out:

Don't forget the writers,

They're a very hard-working crew.

Tip them good the way you should.

And they'll write nice things about you.

You can E-mail your comments and complaints to Max at [email protected].