When It All Began

I’ve been trying to remember when I started playing poker seriously, and it’s embarrassing to say that I’m not really sure.

I know when I learned how to play poker.  It was in 1971, soon after my mom married my stepdad.  In fact, I can remember him asking Mom’s permission; whether it was okay if he taught me and my brother the game (she said she didn’t care).  We got some really cheap plastic chips at Family Drug and a deck of cards.

Back then, there were really only three major variations of poker:  Five card draw, five card stud, and seven card stud.  I liked draw best because it was so cool.  I didn’t like five card stud, and seven card stud was okay but a little challenging for a seven-year old (imagine how much more difficult it was for my four-year old brother).  Consequently, we never played very often while I was growing up.  Dad and I played a lot more chess than anything else – I still have the trophy he got me when I earned my first checkmate.

When I got to college, I played a little bit but I was so terrible that I lost far more money than I could afford to, so I stopped playing.  In my first job after college, one of my coworkers hosted a home game, but again all I did was lose so that dropped my interest down to roughly zero.

I think it was the summer of 2005, soon after I moved to Seattle.  I was flipping through the TV channels one afternoon, and happened onto ESPN.  They were playing one of the reruns of Greg Raymer’s WSOP tournament the year before.  I watched for awhile, and even though it was the first time I’d ever seen Texas Hold’em, I said to myself, “I could play that game.”  It wasn’t all that different from the home games I’d played earlier, or what Dad had taught me long ago.

Living in Seattle made it easy to find a cardroom; in my case, the limit tables beckoned just a jaunt down Ranier Avenue to Diamond Lil’s (I was living in the Central neighborhood at the time).