MICHELE BENDER | If poker's a sport, then I'm an athlete

BY MICHELE BENDER
For The Tribune-Democrat
Apparently, when I wasn’t paying attention, someone decided that poker is a sport.

While channel-surfing one night, I discovered “The World Series of Poker” on ESPN.

Silly me. I always believed a sport involved athletic prowess: Throwing a ball, running on a field, that sort of thing.

If sitting at a table holding cards and betting money makes you an athlete, then I’ve “got game” too.

As a kid, I believed poker was a mysterious grown-up ritual.

My dad and his cronies gathered in our basement for their special sessions. I’d listen at the top of the stairs, hearing them say words like “raise, straight, bluff and flush.”

Years later, I married a guy whose family loved poker.

I learned to play at their weekly Saturday night games.

Uncles, aunts and cousins would be dealt in and out through the evening, taking turns. Sometimes as many as eight people squeezed around my mother-in-law’s kitchen table.

We played colorful games with colorful rules.

“Baseball” featured threes and nines as wild cards. “Night Baseball” meant only black threes and nines were wild.

In “Acey Deucey,” players bet that the card they drew would fall between the two cards they’d been dealt.

But “Indian Chief” reigned as the craziest card game of all.

Each player received one card with no peeking. You held it up to your forehead, face out, and bet on the basis of seeing what cards the other folks held.

We bet nickels and dimes with a ceiling. No one could lose more than $5. If you lost your $5, you played “poverty” until you won a pot and could resume betting.

Aunt Dolly was our most enthusiastic player.

She’d shriek, “I won! I won!” as excited as if Ed McMahon had just shown up on her doorstep with a big ol’ check.

When we moved across town in the ’80s, we brought our poker party tradition with us.

The neighbors loved it, and on Saturday nights, our crew traveled to kitchens and dining rooms all over the ’hood.

Our older neighbor, Arnie, who played serious poker with his circle of friends, shook his head over our nutty games, but said he missed us when he went south every winter.

One February, another neighbor Marlene and I decided to hold a President’s Day picnic.

Folks brought picnic tables, lawn chairs and Kerosun heaters to my garage.

Our potluck menu included Crock-Pots full of soups and chili, and lots of hot chocolate.

Forty-two people braved the chill that Saturday afternoon. Then I had an idea. I handed out one card to every partygoer, including the children.

“Hold the cards up to your foreheads,” I instructed, and I snapped a group picture.

I mailed it in a letter to Arnie.

“A few neighbors dropped by for a game of Indian Chief,” I wrote. “We missed you!”

It was the sporting thing to do.

News Added: 26 January, 2009

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