All I can see right now is playing cards in my mind. Am I dreaming now? May be.. hmm.. its 3:30 am, I just came from yet-another poker night-out from my friend KM's place nearby. I'm reminiscing some of the bad beats and few good hands, I played tonight.
I was introduced to this game by my colleague few years back. First time we played, it was just fun. Since I was learning the ropes, I had no pressure in performing well. :) The game had no stakes what-so-ever, no seriousness, just fun between friends and familes. The wives (of my friends) thought guys shouldn't spend money on gambling, so it was just play-money. Funny though, whenever a spouse's money got over, they borrowed some from their counter-parts. It was a never ending game.
After few months, I and my friends (who were singles) started playing, learning, making mistakes, fighting over the rules (and immediately googling it to find the right answers) and got slowly mesmerized into the game.
We started playing every friday night, sometimes even saturday nights, even in the daytime. All we think about in the weekend was poker. We graduated from 1 dollar game to 5 dollars pretty soon. Example: if 5 players played, we all would play for 25 (5 * 5) dollars. First place would get 20 dollars and the second would get back his/her money.
We always encouraged and allowed new players into our circle, as we thought we could squeeze some money from them. But most of the time, it turned out that the new-comers won more money... we concluded it was "beginner's luck". :) If a new-comer won the first time, we somehow pull him/her the next time we play and we make sure we get the money out from him/her. Most of them fall for it the second time. Well, you know, we had to maintain our poker status.. so we did it!
The problem started when we hit the casinos. Playing poker in casinos are completely different than at home-games -- you tend to lose more money quickly and frequently. We were the little fishes, wandering around not knowing what to do, playing all stupid hands, while the sharks were eating us alive. Above it all, you are literally sucked into the game after a while and are completely addicted. I realized what addiction meant, literally. I believe its worse than smoking cigarettes or drinking.
First time poker-in-a-casino was with my dear friend MS in LA. We had fun and made some money... (that's a whole different story marked exclusively for another post). Back at my home town, myself, two of my friends, KM and SG hit the nearby bay-101 casino. While we won some days, we mostly lost. You can catch us there most of the weekends. We have managed to pull lot of all-nighters, start around 11 pm friday night and play till 10 or 11 am the next day and of course sleep the whole day and get up at 7 pm and hit the casino again. :)
Only when I recognized how my hard-earned (really?) money was vanishing from my bank account, I decided to put a stop to this. I completely stopped going to the casino now, while KM is still hitting it and making some decent money now-a-days.
But, we are still playing poker at home, now its a 20 dollar buy-in. It has gone up from 1 to 20 in 2 years -- not bad... huh?
You can see different sides of the person when they are in the poker table. As the famous poker mantra goes: "There are no friends at a poker table". It is not just about making little money (well, it wouldn't hurt to have some extra cash, say 40 or 60 dollars poker-money in your pocket), but winning against your friends, playing with their mind, teasing and taking advantage of their weaknesses in the table, understanding how they treat money, how far are they willing to spend another 20 dollars to play, how pissed they get when they have a bad-beat -- all of these are fun.
Well, my conclusion of poker game is that, yes, while I agree that poker is a skill game, you *still* need a little bit of tiny luck to get you thru'.
Yes, poker is a funny game, but I have fun playing it with my friends. At the end, that's all it matters, having fun for 4-5 hours, not thinking about any of your worries or your responsibilities and being into the game fully. In a way, that is like meditating for straight 4-5 hours. It might be a stretch, but it is true.
Playing poker is meditation. How funny, well, poker is still a funny game. :)
P.S: This is just a glimpse of all the poker fun we had for the past 2 years, while there are more stories to tell, this post has become very lengthy (at least according to my standards), so I'll stop here now. More on poker to come later.
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