The Sporting Life:
The Public Professor’s
Saturday Sports Column
I like to play poker. And not because I got drawn into the highly edited drama of Texas Hold `Em at the World Series of Poker on ESPN, or because I saw some big breasted pin-up playing in a celebrity heads-up tournament.
I like playing poker because I’ve always liked playing poker. I began as a small boy, playing War, Old Maid, and Steal the Old Man’s Bundle with my immigrant grandmother; I got initiated into the harder stuff when my father dealt me a game of 52 Pick-Up; and I learned the holy trinity of poker from him shortly thereafter. No, I’m not talking about Guts, Baseball, and Acey-Deucey. I’m talking about the basics:
Five Card Draw: The original poker game, a bluffer’s paradise invented right here in America.
Five Card Stud: Balls to the wall, play `em as they lay, one-down and four-up.
Seven Card Stud: The purest of all poker games, complex and richly textured.
I moved beyond family games in high school, playing regularly with friends in the Bronx. We were young, we were drunk half the time, and we were seduced by the allure of wild cards, those sparkling but shallow vixens whose frosted jeans and teased blond hair blinded us with tall tales of living fast and finding glory through 
empty promises of five of a kind.
We played for small amounts that meant a lot to us back then. And during those early days, we also engaged in one of the most time-honored poker traditions, from steam boat black-legs on the Mississippi to cigar chomping canines in smoky backrooms: we cheated. Pass a card, fix a deck, hide an ace, mark a deuce. We all did it, we all knew we all did it, and the trick was to not do it too much and to not get caught.
After high school, as we scattered far and wide, we began to play less regularly and more honestly. By the time I was in my thirties, games were a rarity, an annual Christmas night round with the Lupe family of Marble Hill passing for most of my card action in a given year. Even as poker skyrocketed in popularity with the advent of new games like Hold `Em and Omaha, my own participation dwindled.
As the new century opened, I was long past wild cards and cheating, viewing them as the domains of children and scoundrels respectively. And perhaps that made it easy for me to glibly dismiss newer games like Hold `Em. I condescendingly chalked them off as bullshit concoctions for rank amateurs.
Of course I knew it wasn’t true. I’d read James McMannus’2001 Harper’s piece about the WSOP. I knew Hold `Em and the rest were real poker being played for 
real stakes by real players. But I was a crotchety old purist, the new games didn’t appeal to me, and besides, I didn’t play much anymore, so elitism was a luxury that came cheap.
That began to change about two and a half years ago when I helped found what quickly became a weekly poker game here in Baltimore. The other co-founder had a more consistent personal poker history than I did, and he was a few years younger. Both factors made him quite comfortable with the newer games, and he quickly introduced them to our rotation.
We play most weeks now, with the classics standing side-by-side with the Johnnies-come-lately. And the truth is I’ve taken a shine to a few of them, particularly Omaha Hi-Lo, which is a regular feature on our menu. Although I do tend to find straight Texas Hold `Em a bit wanting, a little too rote in nature.
Our weekly gathering is a simple cash game that rotates irregularly through our homes. It’s played for small stakes, and people come and go as they please over the course of a night that typically runs from about 8:30, after the dads get their young kids to bed, until some time after 1:00, when the players need to get their asses to bed so they can go to work the next morning.
Just as the game ends up at the card table in my basement now and again, going 
forward the topic of poker will end up in this column now and again. It may not be like most professional sports because it is not played on a field or in an arena by steroidal freaks, but in many ways poker is the essence of The Sporting Life. You can wear whatever you like, be out of shape, drink a beer, and maybe have a smoke, but you will compete. You’ll feel the sting of defeat, and if you’re lucky or good, you will revel in the euphoria of victory. And man does it feel good.
I don’t need no trophy, no pennant, no ring
To prove I’m a winner who knows how to rock it.
At the end of the night, only need one thing:
Got your goddamn money in my back, hip pocket
You can also find me every Saturday at Meet the Matts.