Poker has been a major part of my life for a major number of years, longer than a lot of the superstars of today’s poker fame have been alive.  It beats me to death at times and I walk away from it when I’m in that frame.  I never used to.  I went back in a repeating loop to play again for a variety of reasons.  As of late I’ve had no desire to play.  While I believe a break from poker is a good thing, I continuously think about the amount of money that’s waiting out there to be won.

Yes, it should, to a degree, be all about the money.  There’s no reason to try to get into the psychology of the game at this point and dissect all the reasons that people play.  If it isn’t about the money, then why would you do it?  Playing for match sticks or rocks just doesn’t have the same zing.  Playing for gold bracelets has a tremendous amount of zing because it includes money, fame, and poker immortality.  There’s hardly a page left to turn that hasn’t been covered in the game of poker by every online poker site, poker blog, poker forum, poker strategy section, include the news media and TV in all of that coverage.  Sorting through it is a major jigsaw puzzle.

Last night my wandering thoughts took me back to the old Montana games and faces that sat around the table with me while I played and dealt.  In those days poker was a rush, an incredible walk on the wild side of watching people behave like they were two year old kids with adult attitudes and pocketbooks to go with it…until they busted.  And then watching them behave even more badly when they lost the last hand that sent them out the door until they got paid or found someone they could borrow from.

Writing a check to play poker in Montana was against the law.  You could cash a check at the cashier’s window though and just renege on it and if the establishment tried to prosecute you, claim that they knew you cashed it to play poker.  Someone in the establishment usually was good for a loan if you busted – unless you had pulled a shitty on them previously for the same thing.  There may have been some loan sharking going on but if so, I had no knowledge of it.  I did borrow to play upon occasion but it was usually among a small group of friends.  And at one point in time, when I was living with a lunatic that thought he was the best poker player in the world, he wrote a number of ‘bad’ checks on our account to one of the establishments we had both previously worked at as dealers and both played there in our off work times.  He even withdrew all of the money from our savings accounts and blasted it off in a 24 hour period.  That relationship had some seriously rocky times; the colors of every black and blue mark you’ve ever experienced ran through that baby.*

The downside to the poker games was the rake.  The maximum allowed pot size by state law was $100 (although many of the counties/cities did not adhere to that limit, Missoula did) and the rake was 6%.  Choke me out, smoke me out, I’m dying now as I think about this but back then it was the way it was done.  When there was only one establishment, they had all the people waiting to come in and blow off their $40 or $50 bucks each payday.  The best structured game limit was a $3-6 game – and no limit was not even whispered in the same sentence with poker in those days.  Although they did run a “Big Game” that appeared to be intimidating when I first got into poker.  The idea was that you could bet $53.  Yah, you got it, the overage was for the rake if you got one caller. If you got one caller, the pot was made, grab the rake, deal the cards, push the pot, start the next hand.  If you got two callers, you got change, more callers, more change.  Ten players would put in $11 and the pot would be $104 for the winning lottery ticket.

Ray Zee made a killing in the Montana games but not in Missoula MT.  He played in other areas where there was no limit enforcement on the pot size and everyone wanted to gamble, except him.  It worked well.

As more establishments started opening up poker games in Missoula, they started giving away bonuses to bring players in.  Yah, you got this too, just like the online poker sites do – download bonuses, reload bonuses, freerolls, jackpots, etc., etc., etc. In reality, all those bonuses did was hurt the games.  Players ran through the door and got their early buy-in bonus, played X number of hours, cashed, and ran to the next establishment.  The poker rooms had to have shills and managers that sat down in the games with house money…never met a shill that could actually throw a hand away so you know how that part of the story went.  Players got free food, if they wrote bad checks or owed money on the books, they were forgiven and the debts were wiped clean.  Yah, you got that too, no one is going to take their poker buy-in allotment and go to the house they owe money to play poker. The jackpots were the worst, they clipped a ton of extra money out of the player’s pockets and for small communities, there sometimes isn’t a lot of money to go around, start double raking and soon everyone’s broke.  When the jackpot is hit, the player doesn’t say, “GREAT!  I have an extra $12K to play poker on for the next year!” it’s more like, “DAMN!  I can finally buy a washer and dryer and a new car!”  Or someone from out of state wins it and you never see one penny of it again.

Did I ever tell you that I believe jackpots and tournaments are the hardest things on live poker that ever came into being?  Kind of like the worst part of the poker jigsaw puzzle?

*On that relationship note, we came to Nevada to deal major poker tournaments while we still lived in Montana.  At one of the tournaments – I think it was Amarillo Slims at Caesar’s Palace, the lunatic played the $10-20 games at the Stardust all the time with Roy Cooke and Sissy Bottoms (a couple of the grinders).  At one point he was up to a win of $2,400 and would NOT leave the damned table.  Even though we were going home the following day to Montana, he wouldn’t pick up and leave.  I came back hours later, he was now down by quite a bit and just knew he could win it back…win what back?  His win?  I went to a keno machine and hit 7 out of 8 which paid a little over $800.  He showed up.  He was tapped, lost all of the money, and wanted me to give him $200 of the Keno win so he could go back and play.  I really thought about killing him right then and there.  I did not give him any of it, we went home.  What should have been a comfortable time at home financially for a few months (if he’d left with his win) was a frigging nightmare.