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"Still More Exciting Than Pac-Man Night in Micronesia"
Now Playing: "Riot Girl" by Good Charlotte
With the hockey season officially unofficially cancelled again,
Canadians have been forced to turn to a new sport to give meaning to
their empty lives. Thankfully, poker has surfaced to fill that void,
and thanks to the recent influx of poker shows on TV, more and more
Canadians are following their dreams of becoming international poker
superstars like Chris Moneymaker or those other portly, middle-aged,
graying white men you've never heard of. How can you join in on this
hysteria? Here's what happened:
-Study the Game: It's true
what they say, poker is a lot like sex. Everybody thinks they're the
best at it, but only a very select few have any idea what they're
doing. Many novice players think poker is all about luck, when in
fact nothing could be further from the truth. The way Texas Hold 'Em
works is like this: Every player is dealt two private cards, and
then five cards are shared among all the players at the table. The
person with the best hand wins money. Everybody else loses money.
All skill, baby. All skill.
-Play With Other Psychotics Online: Now that you have a
complete understanding of poker thanks to the previous paragraph,
you possess all the skills you need to "get your feet wet," as they
say at poker tables around the world. Here they are speaking
metaphorically, I believe, because it wouldn't really make sense to
play poker with wet feet. You might get pneumonia or at the very
least smelly socks. Online poker is huge these days, and there are
hundreds of websites that allow you to play with a limitless number
of people who I find very scary myself. These people sit at online
poker rooms for dozens of hours at a time, surviving entirely on
beef jerky and
Dr. Pepper. Now's your chance to be
one of them! Nobody said becoming an international poker phenom that
nobody's ever heard of was going to be easy.
-Practice Chip Tricks: After approximately 800,000 hours of
online play, you might be ready to play a real live game of poker.
But before you can be deemed worthy to touch real cards by the poker
god Pokey III, you must learn the most important poker skill of all:
Chip tricks. If you watch poker on TV, and I really hope you don't,
you'll see that all the greats like... um... that fat bald guy with
the handlebar moustache, or the Chinese guy who doesn't look Chinese
at all, ALL these guys are expert at chip tricks. They can do the
chip shuffle, the chip spin, the chip Macarena, the amazing
incredible disappearing chip stack, the works. These guys are
masters of playing with their chips, and you should be too. You've
got to have something to keep yourself occupied if you're going to
be sitting at a table full of ugly people for hours on end.
-Learn to Bluff: Bluffing,
also known as lying, is something people practice every day, often
without knowing it. When you tell that girl at the bar that you're
an astronaut, you're not actually lying to her. You're practicing
your poker skills. When you're sitting at a poker table, everything
you say and do will be quietly judged by the other players, so you
should make sure never to tell the truth about anything, no matter
how small or insignificant. The best way to get good at bluffing is
to practice on your friends and colleagues even while you're not
playing poker. Some good bluffs to pull on your friends are: "My
parents were just killed and/or dismembered in a car crash. Will you
have sex with me?", "I need twenty thousand dollars for bail money,
how quickly could you sell a kidney?" and "I just got my AIDS test
back and I'm feeling pretty depressed. Will you have sex with me?"
If you get away with any or all of these you've got what it takes to
master a card game less complex than Crazy Eights. Can I have your
autograph?
-Scam Your Friends: This step may be omitted by the majority
of my readers, due to an obvious lack of friends to scam. This is
because market research and focus group testing has indicated that a
whopping 98% of Text-Heavy fans believe that tin foil hats will
prevent the government from broadcasting signals into their head.
The remaining two percent belong to NAMBLA. But if you DON'T read
this column then now's your chance to trick your friends out of very
small amounts of money. You'd be amazed how far a few chip tricks
and over 1 million hours logged online will take you. Perhaps you
could arrange a "poker night" at your house or your mom's house,
where you invite ten or so people over and quickly relieve them of
twenty dollars each. That ought to sustain the coke and whores habit
a few more months.
-Perfect the Lingo: One of the hardest things to learn about
poker is all the jargon that is associated with the game. Although
it's possible to play poker expertly without knowing a word of
terminology, you wouldn't want Chris Moneymaker making fun of you
because you went "all-in" with "Big Slick" on "the pre-flop," would
you? WOULD YOU? Because I sure wouldn't, boy howdy. The best way to
learn all this confusing, arbitrary and mostly made-up terminology
is to increase your time logged online above 3 million hours. That
way you'll absorb the lingo through osmosis, which as far as you
know is another word I just made up.
-Know Your Tells: You ever see professional poker players
wearing sunglasses and wonder why they would do that in a dark,
smoke filled casino? It's because poker players "in the know" want
to avoid giving away any "tells," which let the other players know
what the heck you're hiding. The eyes are one of the biggest tells
in poker, hence the glasses, and I can totally understand this. I
can't even begin to count the number of times I've stared into the
eyes of a loved one, you know, really gaze deep inside them, maybe
on a date, and it was just totally obvious they were protecting
pocket aces with a flush draw. If you can't afford an expensive pair
of sunglasses the alternative is to gouge your eyes out with a
Phillips-head screwdriver. It's a small price to pay to cover your
tells.
-Enter a Live Tournament: Ok, you've logged sixteen trillion
hours at the online poker rooms, and driven your friends and their
friends into a life of poverty and squalor. Now you're ready for the
real deal: a casino poker tournament. The big tournaments usually
have an entry fee between 5 and 10 thousand dollars, plus the cost
of a plane ticket and hotel room in Las Vegas ($8). Bear in mind
thousands of people enter these tournaments, and only 10 or so come
away with any money at all, so you'd better be sure you know what
you're doing. Even still, you will get a run of bad cards and be
ousted from the tournament within 12 minutes, and the play-by-play
man will blame it on your lack of experience and immaturity. I don't
get it either.
-Start Rebuilding your Life Savings: Well, that was fun,
wasn't it? Now that you've been eliminated from the tournament, your
poker journey is over. It's been a good run, but it's time to return
to your normal life back home, assuming you didn't have to sell your
home in order to pay the entry fee for the tournament. In any event,
you're probably going to need a few months to get your life back in
order, and maybe write a letter to your attorney explaining how you
just spent your inheritance on gambling (it's gambling, remember?).
You should probably also attend some meetings to get yourself off
the wagon.
-Take Up an Easier Sport: Now that poker has been accepted as
a legitimate sport, despite the fact that it takes less physical and
brain prowess to play than it does to
operate a McDonald's cash register,
it's only a matter of time before other common day-to-day activities
become legitimized. This is good news for you, the washed-up poker
player, because even if you don't have the skills for Hold 'Em you
could still become world champion at an equally demanding sport,
like taking out the garbage, watching Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman
Marathons (harder than it sounds) or writing weekly "comedy"
newsletters for the Internet (way easier than it sounds). The most
important thing to remember is to never give up, follow your dreams,
and someday you too might accomplish something irrelevant yet
impressive. See you at the tables!
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