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THROUGHOUT
OUR CHILDHOOD, my brother and I were repeatedly told a cautionary
tale from the youth of our otherwise unimpeachable father. On
the troop ship back from the war, the end of which he had spent
in East Africa, twenty-seven-year-old Major John Holden of the
Lancashire Regiment lost fifty pounds sterling playing poker
-fifty pounds, virtually everything he had managed to save throughout
his long years away. Our mother, whom he had married in 1940,
would still turn pale at the memory.
Though ours was a family which enjoyed weekend card games, poker
was thus strictly discouraged. We played all the usual English
childhood games, some of them involving modest wagers: hearts,
racing demon, New market, canasta, and many different types
of patience. But above all my parents were dedicated amateur
bridge players, who pored over the Sunday bridge columns and
played in weekly penny games to the ends of their lives.
One weekend in the mid-1970s, when I was visiting them in Lancashire,
my mother grew very impatient with my ineptitude as her bridge
partner. I was always overbidding, flouting what few conventions
I understood, and generally letting the side down.
"1 don't understand it," I remember her saying. "You
have such good card sense." Thus did my secret leak out:
I had got involved in a weekly poker school in London, and it
had ruined me for all other card games. Bridge, especially.
I overbid all the time simply because I didn't want to be dummy.
What was the point of a game where you didn't get to play? And,
I had to confess, I didn't much enjoy games where I had a partner.
Poker players like to be their own man, in charge of their own
destiny, unreliant on partners, conventions, and other bourgeois
refinements of good, honest, gambling games. Poker is the ultimate
monument to the anti-Musketeer code: Every Man for Himself (and
be sure, while you're at it, to kick the other guy when he's
down). For all these reasons, poker players tend to make weak
bridge players, and vice versa.
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