Maudie at PokerWorks

“Two cards are dealt to everybody and then three cards go in the middle. Those three cards are in everybody’s hand. There’s a round of betting and then another card is dealt to the middle, another round of betting and then the final card in the middle. You make your best hand with five out of the seven cards.”

I don’t remember who’s kitchen it was where we were playing, but I do remember my introduction to Texas Hold-em and I remember I liked it a lot.

This was many years ago, looooonnnng before the WPT was a glint in Lipscomb’s eye, during one of our local kitchen table games. It didn’t stick, though. Occassionally it would roll into the agenda of our dealer’s choice games, and each time we had to be reminded how to play.

No, the game that was dealt most over the twenty some-odd years our penny-ante game rotated from kitchen to kitchen, was seven card stud. I’m not sure why. We dealt five card draw, five card stud, anaconda (the game I hated most) with a few others (like hold-em) sprinkled in from time to time.

The reason may have more to do with laziness and greed than anything else. A hand of Stud can stretch out longer than the other games and build a nice little pot. Emphasis on little. For many of the twenty years our group played cards it was a five dollar buy-in penny to play with a dime cap on raises. You get twenty five, thirty cents in the pot, we’d all be salivating.

It wasn’t until the last few years of the game that we decided to live dangerously and raise the buy-in to ten dollars. Only problem was, we didn’t raise the stakes. Well, not right away. It took our brain trust a little time to realize the flaw in our design. Once we clued in, we jumped to quarter caps and two cents to come in. Oh yeah, we were gamblers.

We had several variations of stud - low Chicago, high Chicago, roll your own, Dr. Pepper, to name a few. There was only one of us who had a clue as to how to play the game. A statistical wiz, he was constantly spouting odds at us. It meant nothing - in one ear and out the other. I don’t think we noticed just how many of our pennies ended up in his stack game after game…

I was a whiner - if my stack of pennies and nickles and dimes got decimated, I’d pout and whine. I was also a gloater. Whenever I had a positive kitchen table session, I wasn’t shy about sharing my glee. I think it was after one of these that I gained the moniker Studs. It wasn’t meant as a compliment as much as it was a joke, though. I didn’t win that often.

The moniker gained new meaning a few years later when I was re-christened upon completing a project I was most proud of. The theatre company I worked with had finally gained its own space, but needed renovation. Having no money to hire folks to do it, we did it ourselves with the help of a carpenter who, literally, walked in off the street and said “You need some help?”

Under his tutelage I helped build a couple of walls. I was never more proud when they were raised and secured. Someone called me “Studs” and that one stuck around for a while.

I bring all this up because I sat at a micro-limit Stud Hi table on Full Tilt this evening. I didn’t play for long, but playing the game brought back memories of games around the kitchen table when no-one really knew what they were doing and strategy and odds were foreign concepts.

But, it was a good time, a coming together of friends to laugh, gossip, be silly and maybe leave with enough for a cup of coffee and a bagel in the morning. I remembered being teased, “Way to go, Studs…” and a smile came to my lips.

We haven’t played our kitchen table game for a couple of years. Our last game was at my kitchen table. I remember I did very well that night. Circumstances that I won’t go into here broke the game up, probably for good and I’m kinda sad about that. However I have many good memories to dwell on, and maybe one day, the pennies and nickles in my change bowl can find their way into a pot or two in a stud game some time again in the future.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 14th, 2007 at 10:22 pm and is filed under Uncategorized.