Unfriendly Stakes

They tell you old friends make the best poker pals. Well, whoever said that first couldn't crawl his way through a dust storm in the Panhandle. I mean, there's just nobody I hate to play with more than a group of giddy gooses all liquored up and discussing old times around some poker table in the basement.

Unfortunately, that's the only kind of poker a lot of folks ever get to play. If you live in Longmont, Colorado, for example, you can't go advertising for new players in the local paper. Often these games end up with a whole gathering of uncles and aunts and some brother-in-law who's visiting the neighbor up the street.

A lot of friendly games are just casual contests among old pals who struggled through college together. There's a similarity, I think, between such games and the bridge parties for neighborhood housewives. Poker games of this sort tend to be loose and informal. Rules are rules, but the boys seem to piece them together whenever it seems necessary, rather than thinking them out in advance.

And that, brother, brings me to my main objective about too-friendly poker games. Maybe your idea of a good time is sitting down with Oscar Madison and the boys, but I've seen a lot of good men lose a lot of money under those circumstances.

Usually these games start off small. But week after week (or sometimes hour after hour), the taste for higher-stakes poker beckons. Pretty soon a game that started off dollar-limit is twenty-dollar limit with all sorts of wild cards thrown in, and George is writing Norman a check for twenty-five hundred bucks. It begins to hurt. Things get serious fast.

Let me tell you, there's just nothing that will cool down a friendship as quickly as one buddy going out to buy new carpet with the money that was supposed to go toward purchasing the loser's vacation property on the lake.

When the stakes increase, those gentlemen's agreements about making up the rules as you go along suddenly seem dangerous.

There are plenty of arguments at these "friendly" games.

Two years ago, I was invited to a friend's for dinner. There was a poker party downstairs. Some of my good pals from college were seated comfortably around an old dining room table. At first, there was a maximum $5 bet. Four hours later it was pot-limit with a $10 blind. If you know much about pot-limit, you'll recognize that this can get mighty expensive.

My friend Alex, who sort of got roped into the game to begin with, was losing $1500. His wife came downstairs.

"How much?" she screamed upon learning of her husband's disaster. "I'll win it back. Just sit there and be calm," he instructed.

But she would have none of it. "Let's just say good-bye to these nice people and head on home." Her voice was heavy with sarcasm. So Alex left like a dog trying to hide his tail. Luckily I hadn't agreed to play, because two very vocal arguments popped up on the following hands. One was about whether Paul had the right to grab his hand back out of the discards.

Well, sir, this pot was around $1200, and everyone was serious about Paul having a dead hand.

"But the same thing happened to Alex the first hand we played tonight. And we all let him play the hand," Paul protested.

The host said, "Yeah, but we were only playing for five bucks then." And that settled the argument.

Here's a little advice: Decide in advance whether the kind of poker you're going to play is social or serious. If it's social, play for painless stakes and make up the rules as you go. But if it’s serious, define the rules; forget your friendships and play to win.