Poker Op-ed From Michael Kaplan: Let's Hear It For The Home GameNothing Beats Playing For Quarters Around The Kitchen Table |
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Whether you’re Phil Ivey or the biggest mush to have ever been dealt a hand of Texas hold’em, chances are that you first played live poker on a kitchen table and that you cut your teeth in some iteration of a home game.
The recollection of this was kicked off last week by the Card Player article offering advice on how to spice up your home game with a poker variant called Dramaha.
These days where everyone is looking to get a leg up with the best poker software and tournaments with million-dollar purses snag all the headlines, the story and accompanying photo of people laughing it up at a cramped table, with out-of-season Christmas lights on the wall, brought back my earliest home game memories.
For me, it was playing poker after junior high school, on the parquet table of a latchkey kid whose parents both worked. We’d bring our nickels, dimes, and quarters to finance games like Guts and Follow the Queen. While we should have been doing homework, we devoted time to learning other lessons – like how it feels to lose money to friends, that you actually can bluff when you have nothing going on, that life is Darwinian.
It also taught us to lie to our parents when they asked what we were doing during the hours between school and dinner. “Playing Risk,” was my standard line, referring to the geo-political board game where you try to take over the world.
Sometimes I was truthful. Though, at a certain point, my recollection is that we actually played Risk for money, with pocket change thrown into a pot that went to the winner. When you get used to competing for cash, doing it for fun becomes a bit of a dry kiss.
I also figured out that the person who most wants to play and eagerly hosts the game is likely to be the consistent winner. Such was the case with the kid whose parents both worked. Fittingly, his last name was Gold.
Billy Baxter, in my upcoming book Advantage Players, told me about first learning to gamble by playing marbles with his elementary-school-aged friends in small-town Georgia. He bragged that nobody’s marbles were safe when he was around. Eight-ball for money followed, and then came poker.
By the time he was ready to drop out of college, Baxter was half-owner of an illicit casino. And he snagged his piece of the joint by beating the owner out of a small fortune on a makeshift poker table.
While I’ve been known to ante up in AC and Vegas – I am strictly a low roller – most of the poker I play these days is in a home game put on by a buddy of mine. It’s a tournament format with multiple tables dominating the guy’s living room, but it’s better managed than the Manhattan underground poker clubs like the one depicted in Rounders.
Some home games get played for high enough stakes that they rival the blood matches that go down in Bobby’s Room at Bellagio. There was a notorious game held in a Trump Tower apartment. I got brought up to write about it and was promptly booted when one of the fish balked about my presence there.
I think the best-of-breed are friendly hoedowns where games like Dramaha get spread, the jokes are all personal, and stakes are such that being big loser is little more than a mild sting.
Michael Kaplan is a journalist based in New York City. He is the author of five books (“The Advantage Players” out soon) and has worked for publications that include Wired, GQ and the New York Post. He has written extensively on technology, gambling, and business — with a particular interest in spots where all three intersect. His article on Kelly “Baccarat Machine” Sun and Phil Ivey is currently in development as a feature film.
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