Poker Articles

I think it is pretty safe to say that anyone who visits Pocketfives.com has at some point played cards around a kitchen table. I wonder how many of us still break out the cards, chips, beer and pretzels, and play the game the way we used to. No matter the stakes or the difficulty of the opposition, sitting down with a group of friends to play cards is a worthwhile activity nine times out of ten. Those are the best odds you’ll get in poker. When is the last time you pulled up a chair?

My brother and I started up a regular game in the winter of 2003. Yup, we were among those jumping on the bandwagon along with millions of others who were hooked by the ESPN broadcasts of the World Series of poker. I had played before then, from time to time with friends, college buddies, once or twice in high school, and I even remember playing with pennies with family a time or two, but now it was “for real”.

We quickly graduated from plastic Hoyle chips to a set of 11.5 gram clay composite beauties that he and I bought together as a mutual Christmas present. That was before the market was flooded with them. The same set today probably costs $30 but we forked over upwards of $150 with shipping. Considering the amount of play and pleasure we got out of them, they were worth every penny. Add in a folding felt tabletop and we were in business.

The game was No-limit Texas Hold’em and the last man standing got the cash. It was a glorified sitngo, but with attendance sometimes pushing us out to two tables we felt like it was a huge accomplishment just to make it to the final three. The buy-in was either $5 or $10, so there was never a lot of cash on the line, but the real prizepool was bragging rights and those, my friend, are priceless.

It wasn’t long before we were playing every week, sometimes two and three times a week, and somewhere along the line we decided to start keeping track of our results. The obvious next step was to make it a league format, which we began in the summer of 2004. We played two $10+1 tournaments every week, Friday and Saturday nights with the $1 going to the league prizepool for an end of season tournament. Yes, that’s right, I said we played every Friday and Saturday night for six months. What can I say, we were junkies.

The point system was pretty simple: for every person you outlasted you got a point. So, six people played and you won you got 5 points. Ten people= 9 points. The math wasn’t hard, but the feeling of going out first and receiving a big fat zero for the week was excruciating. We played pretty deep stacked poker with a slow blind schedule to give everyone a change to play for a while, so the first person to go out was often more than hour into the game. The surviving players would always yell out, “Points!” once that first person dropped, which was more important for most of us than getting in the money. From season two on we added bonus points for the top finishers to reward those who were actually cashing over those who were just hanging around every week.

While for the most part the players in this game are pretty bad, there are a few solid players and everyone has been getting better as we go along. I used to feel pretty confident that I was the best player at the table by quite a margin, but one of our regulars has really taken off. He has won several smaller live events in Tunica and even one he entered in Washington State while on a cross country motorcycle ride. His results in our game are pretty erratic, but when he makes it to the final three he usually wins. One season, out of 25 games I think he took first in nine of them. He may not know what reverse implied pot odds are, but I’m not afraid to say he’s a better player than I am.

Last weekend I returned to play in my first game of season five, even though I had already missed 3 games and I will likely miss many more before the season is over. My brother and most of the other players are in their 30s and married, so Saturday night poker is great for them, while I’ve decided I need to get out more. Nevertheless I plan to make it as often as possible because it is a ton of fun, and when it comes down to it, I can’t give up my shot at those precious bragging rights.

A great thing about this community is that playing in the Pocketfives Open and some of the recent promotions where the tables are full of Pocketfivers, it feels like a home game. Just remember, it’s BYOB and first man out has to deal.