HOSTILE FORUMS This is the time of year for good will. Maybe some of you can inject a bit of it onto the web’s burgeoning number of poker forums. I haven’t seen so much verbal aggression this side of Peckham after midnight. Strategy posts are riddled with players calling each other names. Anyone who fails to agree with a particular point of view is a moron or a fish. It’s like East Enders with cards. Surely we should be able to exchange views with a reasonable degree of respect? Fxxk it! The truth is it’s fun! Some of the best tips I’ve ever come across have roared out of fuming flame fests from some of the rudest people on the planet. The best social games I’ve played in have always featured an old school polite gentleman, a buxom woman trying distract all around her with a flesh canyon deep enough to hide two packs of cards and a sewer-mouth delicately garnished with a smattering of more normal human beings. My only New Year’s resolution is that poker and the people who play it DON’T CHANGE!
CARD-IAC ARREST! I was invited to a late night pre-Christmas card party a week ago. I love these situations. Almost everyone at the table has drunk too much and as a teetotaller the odds are with me from the outset. Accordingly I win a few easy pots as the conversation drifts into drawl and eventually descends into dribble. The big one arrives. I’ve got pocket Kings and the land around me looks well watered with champagne and gin and tonics. I plough in with some balanced raises. High enough to command interest but not so aggressive as to scare folks back under the lids of their five star mince pies. I get to a monster heads up with a large guy I’ve never seen before who’s eyeballs look like they’ve been taken out and individually pickled in hydrochloric acid before being replaced in their sockets. There’s only a Queen on the flop and feeble support in the shape of a Three and a Five unsuited. Mr Ginsponge unfortunately is holding the twin sisters to the lonely Three and I am gutted like a mackerel by a man whose literal THREE of a kind was the outsider from hell. I’m in card-iac arrest. I retreat to my mince pie and notice the last flickerings of the dim light of experience glint from behind Ginsponge’s drooping red eyes! I’m not sure if it’s my forum fixation affecting my hearing but I’m convinced he mutters, “Merry Christmas you, Moron!” under his inflammable breath.
