YOUNG GIFTED AND STACKED! Here’s a 2006 true story to inspire any young student currently toying with the idea of taking up poker. Jeff Madsen was so young he couldn’t join this year’s World Series of Poker until half way through the events because that’s when he celebrated his twenty first birthday and legally came of age for the tournament. He didn’t let that little handicap hinder his progress as he managed to reach the final table in four separate disciplines winning two of the treasured WSOP bracelets in the process. One of these bracelets was won when the young Madsen defeated no less than poker super star Erick Lindgren in a heads up.
MULTI-MILLIONAIRE AT 21! You would think that would be enough for a kid who now has to return to University to complete his studies? Not a bit of it. He’s been voted World Series of Poker Player of the Year and walks away with a huge sponsorship deal and winnings so far of $1,467,000. I’m guessing he’s not going to have too much trouble paying off his student loan.
POKER’S MORE THAN A GAME A pal of mine was asking why poker, above all other card games, conjures up so much emotional imagery. I knew exactly what he meant. I recall as a teenager first reading about those life and death games played out in Deadwood and Kansas City back in the Wild West when an improbable hand was often trumped by a searing bullet through the brain. (Or in Wild Bill Hickok’s case, through the back!) Prior to this of course poker had spread up the Mississippi from the riverboats in the early 1800’s and was picked up by the frontiersmen and trappers who took it all the way West on their travels. Somehow there’s a mind-magic about the dusty tables, the buxom saloon girls, the gunslingers, the cowboys and guys fighting it out for a Few Dollars More. These are not images that bring so-called polite games like “Bridge” or “Canasta” to mind. Most of the variations of poker came into being during the blood and guts of the American Civil War which spawned such favourites as stud and draw poker. In the end it was largely through this adoption of the game by the American army that poker in all its forms spread throughout Asia and other large tracts of the gambling Globe. My own best historical recollections are of listening endlessly to Bob Dylan’s classic poker anthem “Lilly, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts!” while I learned the difference between, straights, flushes and four-of-a-kind. For God’s sake someone pass me a tissue.
