A Popular Card Game

People have been playing poker a lot. Have you noticed that? There are at least three television shows about people playing poker, and it seems like even more of my friends and coworkers are taking up the game. And that doesn't even mention the people I know that were already hardcore poker fiends. Poker is everywhere. Even on the internet.

I've been playing a little poker myself with some of my friends. Nothing big, and nothing involving people that practically live in casinos. Just some newbies trading a few bucks back and forth. But because I've been doing pretty well, I kind of wanted to see how I'd do against real players. My first thought was that I should just go to a casino, because for some reason the Seattle area is infested with them. But then I realized there was a pretty good chance I'd run into people from work at one (for some reason, just because we make card games, there are a lot of people here who are card players. Weird how that works out). So then I decided to play online, since the Internet Poker industry has been spending so much time and energy trying to get my attention. I won't say which online poker emporium I went to because I'm already worried that I've said "poker" so many times that the comments on this entry will be buried in Spam.

In order to play for money, I had to deposit money first. And there was a $50 minimum, which I found a bit annoying. I mean, I just wanted to dip my toe in the water, reassure myself that I wasn't anywhere near good enough to play for money against strangers, and rush back home. But if this is the price of doing business, so be it: let it never be said that I'm afraid to waste money in frivolous ways on the Internet.

So I dropped my $50 and prepared myself for fifty dollars worth of fun. That's a different story, which I should tell some time, but the short version is that I decided years ago that "fifty dollars" was the basic measurement of fun. If you go to the movies, you can get hours of fun for fifty dollars. At a strip club, your fifty bucks will be gone in ten minutes, but it will be a more . . .intense kind of fun. At the library, it's almost impossible to spend fifty dollars in the pursuit of fun. Unless you make a lot of copies or start paying off other people's fines or something. Anyway, I could go on about the concept (and now that I think about it, maybe that would make a good series of articles), but I'm trying to talk about the poker.

The first thing I played was a single-table $5 tournament. Ten people all pony up five bones (because I'm tired of saying "dollars" and "bucks" all the time) plus one for the house. So that's a prize pool of fifty dollars. And they play Texas Hold 'Em until there's only one person left. The winner gets half the prize pool, the runner-up gets 30%, and the other 20% goes to the third-place finisher. I did well. Very well. In fact, I won. First place.

Well! So now I've won $25, which means I have a total of $69 in my online poker account. And already I'm getting delusions of skill. Poker is easy! You sit down, click on some buttons, and make some money! Oh boy!

Then I played in a $10 tournament (which cost $11 to play) and finished . . . tenth. Dead last. Huh. How about another $5 tournament? Nope. Dead last again. Part of the reason was that I was getting bored. I'm no stranger to sitting in front of the computer all day, but I wasn't really enjoying myself. So I made some, shall we say, unjustifiably strong bets and got out. My account had $52 in it, so I cashed out. Total profit: two bucks. And it only took like three hours!

I don't think I'd want to be a professional poker player. It's not like it's free money; you have to sit there and play all that poker. So there are hours and hours to put in. Plus, you have to risk money while you're doing it. At my current job, the money goes in only one direction.

So that's the end of my online poker adventure. I still have to decide what to do with my winnings. I'm thinking I might buy a couple of candy bars.