The Sporting Life:
The Public Professor’s
Saturday Sports Column
Note: Nicknames have been used to protect the guilty.
A couple of years ago, the regulars in my weekly poker game started ponying up. Each week, you hand over a sawbuck to Dollar Bill, who dutifully adds it to the kitty, which he keeps in a Wegman’s Decaf Coffee can in 
his basement.
The idea was simple. After a year, whoever had the highest hand in any of our games would collect the jackpot and use it as an entry fee for a casino poker tournament of their choosing. We’d all go to cheer him on, and we’d each collect an equal share of the winnings if he cashed.
Stevie Creamcheese busted out of the gate for an early lead with quad aces, but eventually the straight flushes took over. Wolfie had a couple of them at different times, each to the king. Royal flushes don’t grow on trees, so we began to assume it would be him. But then I pounced by flopping a royal flush in clubs during a game of Hold Em. And it lasted a good while, until The Big B.S. hit his royal flush in hearts, the penultimate hand. It proved to be the winner.
Everyone’s busy with work, kids, and whatnot, so it took two years to get all the schedules coordinated, and even at that, we had to leave Wolfie and Stanley behind, but last Saturday six of us drove up to Atlantic City.
The Big B.S. — Man of the hour
Stevie Creamcheese — Smooth, so smooth
Dollar Bill — The bag man
Irish Andrew — Straight outta Dublin
Patch Adams — The Wheel man
Yours Truly — A humble member of the academy
These days, sadly, the vast majority of casino poker is Texas Hold Em. Not our favorite game, so options were limited. Big B.S. selected an Omaha Hi-Lo tournament at the Borgata with a $350 entry fee. Ouch. But we had saved up $300 over the two years, so he only had to cover the remaining fifty.
The truly degenerate part about this? The rest of us all dug into our pockets and signed up as well, with the exception of Dollar Bill, who declined only because he had just played in a Hold Em tourney a few days earlier up in Delaware, laying out $90 entry fees for himself and a few family members.
After a top notch dinner, we got the poker room at the Showtime Casino to spread a game for the six of us and whoever else wanted in: rotating orbits (eight games each) of 7-Stud, Hold Em, 7-Stud Hi-Lo, and Omaha Hi-Lo. No dealer under thirty knew how to deal 7-stud. Just tragic. The ones over 30 absolutely loved us and 
thanked us for giving them the chance to deal something other than Hold Em for a change.
I lost a buck and a half during that first night’s poker escapade (Stevie Creamcheese and Big B.S. were the winners), but it was worth every penny because I claimed a $75 pot on the last hand of the night, and in the process busted out some mustachioed, lite beer-swilling low-life who had already proven his idiocy by proclaiming 7-Stud was a “really boring game,” joking that his rent money was in the pot, and who during that last hand showdown claimed he had a flush, and then a full house, when all he had was two lousy pairs, and I took his ass down with a straight to the queen and sent him home crying. Take that ya sonofabitch.
But what we were really there for was the Sunday tourney. A hundred and twenty entrants, top eighteen to cash. Stevie Creamcheese is universally acknowledged as at least one of, if not the best player in our group, so of course the first of us to bust out. Irish Andrew went down next, his bluff-heavy style crimped by this tournament’s fixed limit betting structure. The Big B.S. soon followed, leaving myself and Patch Adams as the sole representatives of he Baltimore chapter of the Degenerate Social Club. Patch was ahead of me in chips for most of the day, but one huge loss left him vulnerable, and from there it wasn’t long.
I managed to double my money by the 7 PM dinner break. There were 53 players left, we’d been going for six 
and a half hours, and my chip total was near the average. But in my first hand after the shrimp fried rice and miso soup, I cracked under the pressure and folded the second nut high, which would’ve won a large pot. I never recovered, and was gone about ten hands later. I had made it to the top third. No money for that, but hearty congratulations from the posse.
Thirty six hours after leaving, we were back home. A rousing thanks to Patch Adams for doing a masterful job of driving Irish Andrew’s wife’s Volvo minivan round trip, including through a driving rainstorm on the way up.
For now, we’ve got about twenty bucks saved up for next year. Last night Stevie Creamcheese’s quad tens got bumped by Dollar Bill’s straight flush to the jack.
The race is on.