I like to think of them as the ‘glory days’ of poker.  It used to be exciting, and tense, and a gut-wrencher at times, but the most important part of it was…it was fun.  Just the thought of playing was exciting. But then I grew up in another time and under a shitload of stress so poker had to be that one giant escape hatch that offered everything I needed to escape from a work-and-raise-kids lifestyle. 

I never drank much, I got lucky that I never even considered doing any drugs (yah, I smoked cigarettes for a number of years but smartened up and dumped them about 25-30 years ago). So when I played my first hand of poker (Bill Ogg played it for me), poker became my drug of choice.

I really struggled with poker the first few years I played, I still struggle with it but in those days it was completely different.  I didn’t know what hand beat what and I was trying to learn to deal – and play when I could sneak $20 out of the household budget that was always in the minus column.

I dreamt about dealing poker – I still do sometimes.  Now how freaky is that? In the early days when I was learning to deal, I had dreams of dealing at a table that was exceptionally long or a giant rectangular monstrosity that I could never pitch the cards to all the positions…let along have enough cards for all the positions. Sometimes the table top had cracks in it and was laid in old linoleum, like the kind that had sat on the floors of the Oxford for an eternity, with parts of the design worn off and some of the black showing through; but the table was never in green felt in those dreams.

One evening I was napping on the couch before work and my kids woke me up, “Mom, what does ‘turn em over, he’s got aces and kings’ mean?”

Sometimes I was dealing naked with a big blanket/towel type of thing wrapped around me and I kept trying to figure out how I would get out of the dealer’s box without it falling off.

Over the last 10 years or so, those dreams are me trying to get back to work.  Like I’m across town, only had a 20 minute break, for some reason I can’t find my shoes, or my tuxedo shirt and yet I wore it to where I was but now they’re gone.  I try to find a phone to call my supervisor and tell them I’m late but there’s nothing around, even though I seem to be on a crowded street or in a very busy store.

And some of them are me trying to find my line-up in a place that must have a sporting arena, even though it’s not entirely clear, I have to find my line-up in the bleachers. And then try to deal down a bleacher seat about 15 feet long.  And to make it even better, the cards have been cut into crazy, extremely long zig-zag shapes, about 1/4 of an inch wide.

Those are stress dreams for sure – something that relates to my present life but manifests itself with the poker timeline.

I even dream about poker players from time to time; out a clear blue sky one will be in a dream with me, and I can’t find a reason that that particular player would be in my dream.

I like the glory days of poker the best. The games were crazy, intense action, and the $40 buy-ins reigned supreme – once the $40 was gone, the player was out the door and another one took their place.  Except, of course, for the old rocks that nursed every 25c chip and guarded their stack of $1 chips, with a few $5 chips in the mix, like life as they know it would change if they were to book a loser.  They had no gamble in their soul. They’d been there so long they were a permanent fixture and the furniture and grease filled dust had grown around them and to them.

I learned to play Five Card Stud first – and dealt it first too. We played with a joker in the deck – aces, straights, and flushes – and I had no clue.  I knew what the hands were but didn’t know what beat what in the beginning. I made a straight – without the joker – and raised until I ran out of the last of my $20 buy-in into a flush.  I was devastated.  I thought I’d won, only to see my cards hit the muck and the pot get pushed to someone else. I think a video of my face on that event would have been priceless.

A few of the really old farts were prop players. They got to sit in the games on house money and play their worst best to try and leave with more than they sat down with. They played pretty damned snug for the most part, after all, a $10 win in those days was a nice little stack to take out of a $1/$2 game. My problem was that if I won $10, I didn’t want to leave, I wanted to keep playing.

One of the things that absolutely destroyed my ‘poker for dummies education’ was some of the other dealers that came in at the same time I did.  There were three of us that played and dealt together – Rod Kaufman, Kim Louden, and me. We were the action.  A lot of the old farts hated to play with us because we were dangerous but some of the old farts that had been around the block a few times knew that we were how they were going to build their bankrolls.

Well…time’s up…come back for more.