Rounders Changes Everything

People often ask me how I became involved in poker. I've written before about my very first exposure to poker. I was a teenager at hunting camp, and we used to play Liar's Poker while sitting around the fireplace and munching on venison tenderloin as we waited for dinner to be prepared. I learned a couple of valuable lessons from that game. I learned about the importance of position, and I learned how hard it was to make one pair, even with wild cards. I also seemed to have some innate ability to not only fool people into being led down a path, during the play of a hand, but also somehow sensing when someone else was trying to do the same to me.

My second foray, or memorable exposure to poker came at a friendly kitchen table game between friends. This was during my college years. There was quite a bit of drinking that night, and I think I lost around fifty dollars. This did not set well with me. In fact, it was so unsettling that I actually became convinced that there was something going on in the game that had to be cheating. I mean, how could I possibly lose hand after hand while one or two people seemed to win over and over again? Of course, there was no cheating. The losers lost because they played poorly. The winners won that night because they caught cards and knew when to release a hand. Of course, I didn't know any of this, and I did not play poker again until 1997.

In 1997 I was in my second year at Prudential Financial. They had hired a bunch of young, college graduates to fill in the expansion of their Underwriting department. Underwriting life insurance applications is akin to watching paint dry. You sit in a cubicle all day reviewing applications, urine and blood tests, medical reports, and sometimes financial records. Oh yeah, exciting stuff. In 1997, I and five or six of my workmates decided to play poker one evening. The only thing I remember about that night is that I lost, miserably.

It was right around this same time that the movie Rounders hit the big screen. It was while watching this movie that I realized you could beat the game of poker, and winning or losing was based on skill, not just random luck. I had tried many gambling forays before that moment. I had learned to bet the Greyhounds. I should have bet on the buses, but I was betting the dogs. I lost a lot of money on that one. I had tried my hand at blackjack and craps. I lost. But, here was something that looked possible. Besides, I only wanted to be good enough to beat the other jokers around that kitchen table. I rushed right out and bought my first "how to" book on poker.

I'll never forget that book. The book is called "Winning Poker for the Beginning Player" by Edward Silberstang. It was quite basic, and it covered a lot of different games. Hold em was not even the game of choice for most of us back then. We played dealer's choice. Silberstang basically preached a very tight, and very aggressive style of poker. He recommended folding most hands and playing only those in which you thought you probably had the best hand, at that moment.

Well, this was quite different from anything I had ever done before. Everyone I knew played every hand dealt to them, and usually to the bitter end. I read the book, and read it again, and then convinced everyone we needed to get together for another poker night. We had a minimum bet of 25 cents and a max bet of one dollar. I swear to God, this is no lie, I think I won every single time we played for about a year, straight. Seriously.

One thing that stands out about that first night playing, after reading the book, was my good buddy, Dean. Dean had won all kinds of cash the first night we had played, and he had a giant coffee can of change. It was full of quarters, dimes, and nickels. By the end of the second night he had lost every single coin in that coffee can. I had picked up most of it and needed a bag to take all of the change home with me. We made the move to poker chips shortly after that night.

I was in total amazement at how easy it seemed to be able to make money at this wonderful game called Poker. We played on Friday nights, usually every other week. This became our form of "going out". I loved it because I usually won around 30-50 dollars every night we played. I didn't tell my friends about the book I had read for quite some time. I know, I know, maybe I should have. The strange part is, once I did tell them, and they could see how I was beating them each week, they still never considered reading a book themselves, or adjusting their game much. I was in it to win it, and they did not appreciate how I kept folding, folding, folding. They were in it for the fun of it. They were in it for the lure of the next card. I wanted to win.

I was hooked. It all seemed too easy. Would it be possible to win 30 big bets all of the time? What if I moved up in stakes? If I played 1-5 limit stud poker, with the max bet being 5 dollars, would I win $150 each time I played? At the time my salary at Pru was less than 25k a year. $150 a day sounded like more money than someone needed to make. Not even I am devious enough to try to convince my friends to play for more money than I knew they could afford to lose. None of us had much, and gutting my buddies is not what I would call "fun". No, we had to travel to a place where the stakes were bigger, but legal. We needed to go to Vegas.