I played poker for the first time tonight. Specifically, the Texas Hold ‘Em variant that became inexplicably popular a few years back and has shown no signs of going away ever since. I never quite understood why it suddenly shot to prominence, given that it’s surely a game that’s been around for a long time. Anyway, at the time I first noticed a growing national obsession with the game, I put it down to just a fad and never bothered to get involved or learn how to play.

After tonight, I’m wishing I’d started playing sooner! That game is fun. We weren’t playing for big money – a £5 buy-in got us 8,000 chips, and the last man standing would get everyone else’s fivers. But the money didn’t matter. It was the game itself that mattered. I found it pretty amazing how a simple game largely dependent on luck (or card-counting) can have such moments of drama and enormous satisfaction in it. Obliterating opponents with a hand that is just better enough than theirs to screw them over completely is enormously satisfying. Perhaps not for our gracious host, who was one of the first out, quickly relegated to a “kiss of death” advisory role.

I came second in our game. Considering I’d never played before, I thought this was pretty good going. I managed to bluff my way through to some storming victories on a few hands, but was ultimately defeated in the last few hands by a straight vs my two (high) pairs.

I’m not sure if I was just getting lucky, or if I was actually “playing the game” correctly. But there were a number of occasions where the choices I made paid off bigtime for me, in some instances even allowing me to knock another player out. I’d be curious to try again to see if it was just beginners’ luck. I know it certainly wasn’t the others going easy on me. Although perhaps the fact that none of us were particularly experienced helped me out somewhat!

The best thing, though, was to find a game that I was actually good at. I like stuff like Agricola and Power Grid, but as I wrote a short while back, I am generally pretty terrible at them due to something of a deficiency in the strategic parts of my brain. I don’t know what it is. But apparently, it seems, I have a decent poker face. I’m not sure how to take this news. Is it such a good thing to be a good liar?

Well, in the case of a game like poker… of course it is!

You look great in that shirt, by the way.