Straight flush
How to beat the card sharks at their own game
By Tye Smith
Published: Wednesday, March 10, 2004
We were really only there for the golf, but when a Salt Lake resident takes the effort to drive all the way to St. George, can one really golf the whole time?

After all, it gets dark, muscles get sore, balls get lost and with each beer, the courses get longer and harder. It would be somewhere bordering on masochism if we were to do nothing but play golf.

So, after a long day of golf, we would head into Mesquite for some peaceful, homegrown gambling. We didn't want to go all the way to Vegas to lose our shirts to some card sharks, and we didn't want to illegally gamble in Utah, so we took the happy medium by taking the 45-minute jaunt into what became my own personal paradise.

Just to be clear, I have a wildly addictive personality, making gambling games very attractive to me. I have always loved the purity of the thrill of the tables-what could be more pure than the adrenalized rush of putting your money on the line? Money is the key to life in our society, so the thrill is something akin to putting your life on the line.

I'd have to imagine the excitement is similar to that experienced by an extreme athlete. The difference is that cliff jumpers and skydivers are actually are putting their lives on the line. Gambling is a way to simulate that experience, with the only real threat being that you could lose all of your money, your wife could leave you, your whole world could collapse and you might never even get home.

As long as you have some control over the amount of money you are willing to bet (a control I purport to have), gambling can be a lot of fun. It's not so fun if you lose, as the players whose money I took will sadly attest, but when you win it, is the best rush ever.

I had never played poker in a casino before my trip last weekend-now it's all I can think about. Sure, I was a regular at the blackjack tables and I have long been a craps fanatic, but the prospect of getting suckered into a highly technical game like poker at a casino was something I had always had the wisdom to avoid.

But recently, poker has experienced an explosion of popularity. And being the highly influenceable peon that I am, of course I became intrigued with the idea as soon as TV told me it was cool.

Last year, ESPN provided for the first time full coverage of the World Series of Poker, a tournament requiring a $10,000 entry fee. It was a huge hit. The reruns are still going as evidence of the show's popularity. The Travel Channel quickly followed suit (pun intended) by launching its airing of the World Tour of Poker, which features the best players in the world.

Soon thereafter-and this is the one that got me-Ben Affleck won the first televised celebrity poker match in dramatic fashion. It wasn't that I was enamored with Affleck, but I figured that if Affleck could do it, I could too. It wasn't that I respected him, I just thought that if an actor could do it (actors are not well-known for their intellect), why couldn't I?

So into the dragon's lair we went, unassuming and naive. When we arrived, we were informed that several top-flight poker players were in town for a poker tournament, a fact that became more and more evident as we made our way to the poker rooms. On a totally unrelated note, poker rooms are awesome because you can't smoke in them, meaning that the amount of smoke sticking to your clothes can be minimized as long as you stay in the poker room. Not only are your clothes spared the awful smell of cigarette smoke, but it holds strategic value as players who leave to smoke after they fold will miss finding out certain important pieces of information about how people are betting and what they are betting on.

Now I don't claim to be great at poker, and maybe it was beginner's luck, but between my friend and me, we took the card sharks' money-every one of them. We didn't take it all, by any means, but when we left we had more money than we came with, which is more than the experienced vets can say whose mouths are likely still hanging open three days later as they wonder what hit them.

I have to admit, when we first sat down, it didn't look to good for us. We must have looked like tourist idiots because the poker players seemed to think they would be taking our money. You can sense things like that by the way people look at you. The problem is that each one of the poker pros had been playing for so many years that they had developed habits that even they themselves were not aware of.

One big cocky guy would start talking all nonchalantly every time he had a good hand. Another guy would bet every time, so we knew he was usually bluffing. A lumpy nerd in the corner was the best off because he refused to play bad hands, but luck got the best of him as even his good hands weren't enough. Another of the guys would sit up straight every time he had something-it was a dead giveaway.

The poker players were, in a sense, too involved in their game to realize what they were doing. My buddy and I could see it all because it was new to us, as ironic and backward as it may seem.

Anyway, the real fun of poker is trying to read the other people, and from the way things went, it looks like we did a pretty damn good job.

Source: Daily Utah Chronicle