Poker and Self-Help Books-part One
Author's note: Just a little over three pages, this piece transitions you, my one reader, from Minneapolis, Minnesota to Madison, Wisconsin during my Summer Tour.
Funny how the cards are played.
My history with Texas Hold-em Poker is dicey, at best. The first time I ran into the game was about seven years ago in Montana, before it became the game popularized by the recent televising of the World Series of Poker. I had just moved to Missoula and didn’t know a soul. I ended up wandering around downtown and ended up in front of Stockman’s bar.
Funny sidebar that actually has to do with karaoke… My first trip out of the two room shack that I had rented site-unseen, located amongst similar shacks and a few trailers in the industrial park of town, had been a venture across Broadway to what used to be the Limelight Bar. I don’t know if I knew they had karaoke that night (it might’ve been on the sign) or if it was just the closest bar in an unfamiliar town, but (similar to Stockman’s) I didn’t go back much after this particular evening. It was a Friday and the bar was full of cowboy hats and trucker caps. At the time, my hair was the longest it had been, probably down to my shoulder blades, and the song I chose to do was Buffalo Springfield’s “For What it’s Worth,” one of my old favorites from my Utah daze. You know the one… “Something’s happenin’ here. What it is ain’t exactly clear…”
What wasn’t exactly clear to me at the time was the fact that it was a protest song, and judging by the video playing on the big screen behind me as well as a few others in the bar (a video I had never seen during my previous performances… more on this later) there was a heavy slant towards Civil Rights in the song.
So while the long-haired hippy stood on stage singing, throngs of black children played on the screen behind, splashing in spraying water from opened hydrants on city streets and eating their popsicles. I finished the song, and somewhere in the distance, crickets were heard to chirp. Not a big hit apparently.
“Thank you! Goodnight! Don’t forget to tip your servers!”
Okay, now for a brief segue before returning to the main story.
Karaoke videos. Good Lord, they’re horrible. At some other point I’ll tell you the story of performing Waylon Jenning’s “Luckenbach, Texas” in a Chinese karaoke bar in Honolulu in front of a widescreen consisting entire of cows. But the American versions aren’t much better. Personally, as a singer, I never want to the video version. And sometimes it’s a gamble, because the songbook will have two listings for a song, and you just know the version you pick will be one with the video, and when you get up to do “Mamas, Don’t Let your Babies Grow Up to be Cowboys,” there will be a bunch of pretty boys who have probably never even been within twenty feet of a horse sashaying around with a semi-modern version of Daisy Duke.
I used to joke about these actors, wondered who was putting on their resume that they played Johnny in “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” Turns out a friend of mine from college went to acting school in Florida, and one of their exercises involved making karaoke videos. When “Man Without a Band” eventually gets published, I will include an interview with Mr. Russ Benton, but if you wish to see him before then, you can catch him live in Las Vegas starring as Merlin in the show at Excalibur.
And now, back to gambling.
I was never a big gambler. Having spent enough time in poverty in my in-between colleges years, I’ve never been a big fan of losing money. Sure we had the nickel, dime, quarter games between friends in college. You might be surprised; some of those pots could get over a hundred bucks. But it was always between friends, and when you wanted to quit, just like Blackjack, you could walk away, with your winnings or whatever you managed to salvage.
Such isn’t the case in a serious game of Texas Hold-em. To get in the game, you buy in for a certain amount. Depending on the number of players, the winnings can then be doled out between the top winners or simply taken by the last person in the game. There are many variations I’m sure, but the important thing to know is probably the obvious. In many instances, you might walk away with nothing but the memories.
Most of my limited knowledge of the game has been picked up with the rest of America over the past year or so, but when I stumbled on a game seven years ago at the back of Stockman’s Bar (“liquor in the front, poker in the rear”) I barely remembered the order of winning hands from the old college games. Similar to the Limelight, Stockman’s is populated mostly by cowboys (again, probably obvious by the name), and while the guy dealing the cards was younger, most of the occupants of the table were well past college years. Now, while the guy actually dealt the cards, he was not actually “the dealer.” Montana law is, the bar can host the game, but they’re technically not “the house.” You play only against the other players. Or something like that. Whether or not the bar took a percentage of the buy-in was unclear to me, but judging by his come-hither comments, I would say the dealer was either working for the bar, or working for the other players. They had recognized a dummy, a dupe, lingering just outside the perimeter of the table.
“Why don’t you play?” the dealer asked. Five heads turned my direction.
“What’s the game?” I asked.
“Texas Hold-em,” he said. “It’s easy. Like regular poker, just a little different. Watch a few
hands, you’ll get it.”
I finished my beer and sat at the table. Yeah, I didn’t get it. Forty dollars and about five minutes later, I was stepping away from the table. The dealer handed me a card with a offer for a certain amount of “house credit,” telling me I should come back and play again another time, and everyone at the table smiled congenially, but I never played again in the back, or rather got poked again in the rear at Stockman’s.
I’m still getting to the self help section of this story, but it’s getting late, and I’m getting tired. But what I will say is that I didn’t play Texas Hold-em again for seven years, not until my summer trip this year.
My cousin, Matt McCabe, owns a pool hall in Madison, WI. Cue-nique Billiards. One thing I’ll say about Matt… I feel fairly certain that if these were still the days of Prohibition, Matt would own a speak-easy, instead.
Funny how the cards are played.
My history with Texas Hold-em Poker is dicey, at best. The first time I ran into the game was about seven years ago in Montana, before it became the game popularized by the recent televising of the World Series of Poker. I had just moved to Missoula and didn’t know a soul. I ended up wandering around downtown and ended up in front of Stockman’s bar.
Funny sidebar that actually has to do with karaoke… My first trip out of the two room shack that I had rented site-unseen, located amongst similar shacks and a few trailers in the industrial park of town, had been a venture across Broadway to what used to be the Limelight Bar. I don’t know if I knew they had karaoke that night (it might’ve been on the sign) or if it was just the closest bar in an unfamiliar town, but (similar to Stockman’s) I didn’t go back much after this particular evening. It was a Friday and the bar was full of cowboy hats and trucker caps. At the time, my hair was the longest it had been, probably down to my shoulder blades, and the song I chose to do was Buffalo Springfield’s “For What it’s Worth,” one of my old favorites from my Utah daze. You know the one… “Something’s happenin’ here. What it is ain’t exactly clear…”
What wasn’t exactly clear to me at the time was the fact that it was a protest song, and judging by the video playing on the big screen behind me as well as a few others in the bar (a video I had never seen during my previous performances… more on this later) there was a heavy slant towards Civil Rights in the song.
So while the long-haired hippy stood on stage singing, throngs of black children played on the screen behind, splashing in spraying water from opened hydrants on city streets and eating their popsicles. I finished the song, and somewhere in the distance, crickets were heard to chirp. Not a big hit apparently.
“Thank you! Goodnight! Don’t forget to tip your servers!”
Okay, now for a brief segue before returning to the main story.
Karaoke videos. Good Lord, they’re horrible. At some other point I’ll tell you the story of performing Waylon Jenning’s “Luckenbach, Texas” in a Chinese karaoke bar in Honolulu in front of a widescreen consisting entire of cows. But the American versions aren’t much better. Personally, as a singer, I never want to the video version. And sometimes it’s a gamble, because the songbook will have two listings for a song, and you just know the version you pick will be one with the video, and when you get up to do “Mamas, Don’t Let your Babies Grow Up to be Cowboys,” there will be a bunch of pretty boys who have probably never even been within twenty feet of a horse sashaying around with a semi-modern version of Daisy Duke.
I used to joke about these actors, wondered who was putting on their resume that they played Johnny in “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” Turns out a friend of mine from college went to acting school in Florida, and one of their exercises involved making karaoke videos. When “Man Without a Band” eventually gets published, I will include an interview with Mr. Russ Benton, but if you wish to see him before then, you can catch him live in Las Vegas starring as Merlin in the show at Excalibur.
And now, back to gambling.
I was never a big gambler. Having spent enough time in poverty in my in-between colleges years, I’ve never been a big fan of losing money. Sure we had the nickel, dime, quarter games between friends in college. You might be surprised; some of those pots could get over a hundred bucks. But it was always between friends, and when you wanted to quit, just like Blackjack, you could walk away, with your winnings or whatever you managed to salvage.
Such isn’t the case in a serious game of Texas Hold-em. To get in the game, you buy in for a certain amount. Depending on the number of players, the winnings can then be doled out between the top winners or simply taken by the last person in the game. There are many variations I’m sure, but the important thing to know is probably the obvious. In many instances, you might walk away with nothing but the memories.
Most of my limited knowledge of the game has been picked up with the rest of America over the past year or so, but when I stumbled on a game seven years ago at the back of Stockman’s Bar (“liquor in the front, poker in the rear”) I barely remembered the order of winning hands from the old college games. Similar to the Limelight, Stockman’s is populated mostly by cowboys (again, probably obvious by the name), and while the guy dealing the cards was younger, most of the occupants of the table were well past college years. Now, while the guy actually dealt the cards, he was not actually “the dealer.” Montana law is, the bar can host the game, but they’re technically not “the house.” You play only against the other players. Or something like that. Whether or not the bar took a percentage of the buy-in was unclear to me, but judging by his come-hither comments, I would say the dealer was either working for the bar, or working for the other players. They had recognized a dummy, a dupe, lingering just outside the perimeter of the table.
“Why don’t you play?” the dealer asked. Five heads turned my direction.
“What’s the game?” I asked.
“Texas Hold-em,” he said. “It’s easy. Like regular poker, just a little different. Watch a few
hands, you’ll get it.”
I finished my beer and sat at the table. Yeah, I didn’t get it. Forty dollars and about five minutes later, I was stepping away from the table. The dealer handed me a card with a offer for a certain amount of “house credit,” telling me I should come back and play again another time, and everyone at the table smiled congenially, but I never played again in the back, or rather got poked again in the rear at Stockman’s.
I’m still getting to the self help section of this story, but it’s getting late, and I’m getting tired. But what I will say is that I didn’t play Texas Hold-em again for seven years, not until my summer trip this year.
My cousin, Matt McCabe, owns a pool hall in Madison, WI. Cue-nique Billiards. One thing I’ll say about Matt… I feel fairly certain that if these were still the days of Prohibition, Matt would own a speak-easy, instead.
posted by A Man without a Band at 10:47 PM
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