Poker at the pub
Yesterday it wasn’t that easy to celebrate the arriving spring – it was grey and rainy – so I and my boyfriend decided to go for a drink instead of moping in front of the TV. We went to a terrific little Irish pub nearby and drank pints of Guinness. In my bag I happened to have a deck of cards that I had received as promotion from an
online poker site. We decided to play once we had taken our seats in a cosy booth. Neither I nor my boyfriend has much experience in poker playing, though we both enjoy it, competitive as we are.
Quite soon I started getting the feeling that he had more luck in the game than I had. It might very well sound as though I am just a bad loser, but fact of the matter is that after each round when we compared cards, he had gotten a better hand than I almost every time. This made me very frustrated, since I kept coming out as the loser even though I didn’t play poorly. Luckily enough we didn’t play for money…
After swallowing my pride I decided that the only smart thing I could do was just to play the best I can, regardless of the hand I’d been given. As soon as I really started focusing, it immediately paid off. Maybe I got cards that were a bit better than earlier, but most importantly I realized that I hadn’t played aggressively enough. Instead of folding when I was unsure, I tried betting in a way that made him fold. We started ordering more beers, which was good since it added to the game, but bad because it made me loose focus again.
He kept teasing me when I lost, and I decided that I would do everything in my power to win over him and get that smirk off his face.
Then suddenly I was holding a Ten and a Nine when the flop showed a Jack, a Two and an Eight. “You want to play for the tab?”, I asked in a moment of too much courage. He, apparently holding something – which I in reality didn’t – agreed to this suggestion right away. My heart started pounding a bit harder. The odds for me getting a Seven or a Queen wasn’t on my side. The next card was …a Seven.
I have almost never felt that kind of triumph, actually it made me so happy that I offered to split the bill with him. I don’t care that I had lost pretty much every round up until then. I had won the one that mattered.
