It’s Saturday night and you know the poker games are booming. All of the tourists are in town for a convention . . . no, not Comdex. Rumor has it that those guys come to town with $20.00 and they don’t want to spend it all in one place . Hey, that’s just a rumor, ok!
Your Sweet Baby has given you permission to go down and play with the boys and you’re on your way. You pull into the parking garage and just miss the spot that opened right up front, forcing you to drive clear around again and then go the next floor to find a parking space. You hate to valet – never know what those guys are doing in your car, especially if they have time to change the radio station to something they like.
You walk into the poker room and it’s noisy, wall to wall people. You put your name on several lists and there’s 9 million names in front of you on each one. Thinking you have time for a bathroom break and maybe a trip to the mall to do your Christmas shopping, you fail to leave a lock up with the brush person and leave the room for 3 minutes. You come back to find that the brush person already called the names on the list ahead of you and you missed your seat. AGGGHHHHH!!
A seat opens in 15-30 stud and as the brush starts calling name after name for that seat, you’re poised . . . ready to take a hand as soon as it’s yours. You end up with the seat. What a stroke of luck! You even start jiving it up . . . talking through the hands . . . raising, putting a move on the first pot you get into because you’re ready to ROCK AND ROLL. After the first 15 minutes, you’re wondering what the hell you’re doing here. Nothing mooooves these players. It’s like playing with a herd of cows. They’re here to be miserable and they want you to know it.
Every time the action looks like it could take off, somehow a bucket of water gets tossed right into the middle of the small ember that’s trying to ignite. Your timing is way off . . . whenever you pick up a hand, the other players pick up one too and it becomes a shoot out, then the game goes back into the ‘dead zone’. Now you’ve blown off almost all of your chips just trying to establish table presence and it didn’t work. Then the open seat in $20-40 is called. You’re called within the first few names. You signal that you’ll take it.
Your grabbing your meager stack of chips, preparing to bolt to the next game when Lucy, the player in the 7 seat, begins to whenge and complain. Lucy tells the dealer to call the brush person over for a decision. The dealer does as instructed. The brush person is a relief brush and has only had the list for about 20 minutes.
Don’t think that Lucy ever even begins to slow down. She takes right off with it . . . She was 4th on the list for the $20-40 and she wasn’t called and what the hell is the problem here? The Relief Brush tries to explain that when she was called earlier, she refused the seat, and the list was finished – obviously her timing is way off too. Another list started as the game filled up again and she wasn’t on it. Definitely not the right answer according to her, (even though it is right).
Lucy puts on quite a show now. The Regular Brush returns to the room and she calls him over and gives him the, “You made a mistake and what are you going to do about it?”
Maybe he should’ve offered to open a vein for her so she would feel vindicated. Or maybe he should’ve offered to put her on every list, every time he saw her for the next 10 years. Or maybe he should’ve just “pimp” slapped her and told her to get back into her corner and chew on a bone. Or he could’ve explained that his timing was way off because if she asked to be put back on the list if one started, he didn’t hear her. But . . . she got the seat and you’re stuck in that damn $15-30 game.
Question? Hope not because there’s no answer. Is it our nature to be out of sync with everything . . . born too late, born too soon, opened our mouth at the wrong time, raised on 4th street instead of the flop? And on and on and on. How do we ever overcome all of the obstacles of being human?
How many times have we heard, timing is everything, and doesn’t every day life and poker just let you know that that statement came from God him/herself? What if our whole life was just a little experiment – how we spend our time, how we decide what’s important, the memories we keep for the next life, (dejavue)?
What if there’s a grading system – freaking horrible – F, dull horrible – D, simply ok – S, better than good – B, and absolutely astounding (AA)? Where do you rank your experiences?
I would have to give it all an A+ as in pretty damn cool. I hardly ever do anything at the right time including fall in love, buy a car/home, say the right thing at the right time to the right person . . . but there’s one thing I always do at the right time . . . take a seat in a game of poker.
Where else can you satisfy all of your emotional highs and lows, winning, losing, breaking even and watching all of the players give academy award winning performances . . . even though they don’t know they’ve even been graded.
The time to live and play poker is now . . . before we get too old or too broke or everyone else dies and leaves us all alone without any worthy opponents. So let’s just get it on. See you there!