In Another Language, All Games Sound The Same

Photo lifted from worldpokertour.com without permission. I hope they don't mind.

Long term readers of these musings will know that I'm a fan of the World Poker Tour.

I've said before that I don't know what it is about that show, but it's absolutely rivetting. One just sits there, sucked into the whole circus, hypnotised by the turning of the cards. There are other poker shows on TV, and they're about as interesting as watching paint peel, but Mike Sexton and Vince Van Patten do a job behind the microphone on the WPT that's worthy of any commentary team in any sport around the world. If you didn't understand English and didn't know they were calling a poker game, you'd absolutely believe it was football, baseball, hockey, cricket, basketball, or any other game of the day. It's none of those. It's poker which, last time I checked, wasn't a sport (though it is marginally more physical than chess, which is... go figure). And the "unique" terminology of the game starts to stick in your head when these two prattle on about Rivers, Flops, Dolly Partons, Gut Shot Straight Draws, and a whole dictionary of other things make up the jargon of their trade

That's not the point of this rant though...

Last night Zac wanted to get up at 4am and there were two choices... get up, or be jumped on.

I tried the second choice for a while, but it became clear that the first was the only real option, so we found ourselves camped downstairs in front of the TV watching WPT.

Getting horizontal on the lounge is very dangerous for this bear, because I can enter alpha sleep rather quickly and external auditory stimulii can influence my dream state.

So there I was, curled up, "asleep", with the brilliance of the WPT commentary in the background, and I started creating a WPT tournament in my dream.

No. I didn't win it. I wasn't even in it.

It was as though I was still awake, still watching TV. But it wasn't the tournament flickering in front of me... it was a very diffeent game where the players were "pairs", that is, two players playing the same hand together. That led to the inevitable conflict of playing styles, a fight, and someone shouting "fuck you, you bastard, you don't even have the balls to tell me you're having an affair", which was pretty much the end of that couple as they went "All In" with Big Slick against this other team that had Six Two on Suite, Flopped a Pair of Twos, and drew a Flush on the River.

Bizarre, especially as I have absolutely no idea where the whole "affair" thing came from.

Not to worry... if you see a doubles tournament on the WPT anytime soon, you'll know you heard about it here first!