Jedi Reunion 2007

Hey look! Two posts in one day.

Memorial Day weekend means its time to get together with a bunch of my good friends from high school in for an annual event we affectionately refer to as the Jedi Reunion. Yes, I like Star Wars, why do you ask?

This year's reunion was somewhat more tame than in years past. There are a couple of reasons for this. The first being that with the exception of my wife and I, everyone had a child under the age of one. That means sleep is a precious commodity and staying up until the crack of dawn isn't much of an option any more. Not that I can stay up that late anymore anyways. The other reason is that John, our host was suffering from food poisoning and couldn't drink as much as usual. More often than not he's the one instigating the excessive drinking that often accompanies this weekend, but he was somewhat restrained on account of illness. At least that's the story he gave. Could be he's getting soft in his old age, but for now I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.

In addition to the regular shenanigans that accompany these weekends we did actually play some poker. Or what loosely resembles poker to the untrained observer. We played a 6 handed cash game with each player taking turns calling a game for an orbit.

Last year John kept calling a game called guts, which I refuse to acknowledge as a poker game. The game works as follows: Each player is dealt two cards and then must decide if they are in our out. The dealer counts to three and player that are in hold their cards while player that are out drop them. If more than one player remains in, the winning player takes the pot while the losing players must match the pot for the next hand. Play continues until only one player stays in and he beats a blind "Ghost " hand.

It's retarded. It takes an hour to play through a full "hand" and more or less negates any actual poker earnings that you may have made. We might as well just roll dice with the high roll taking the pot. I tried to declare it as an illegal game but it was John's house so it was his rules and he called it. The fact that he knew it pissed me off certainly didn't have an effect on his decision to call that game.

My wife tried to back me up by calling Euchre and Kings in the Corner when it was her turn to pick a game, but for some reason those games weren't allowed.

All in all, the play was abysmal. More time was dedicated to arguing about, talking about and deciding on the music being played on the Comcast music channels than actual play. An average hand took about five minutes to play. Maybe next time we should start playing before we're fairly well intoxicated. Then again we'd have to start around noon.

The only real significant hand that I remember was when I was in the small blind and John was in the big blind. It's probably not a good idea for us to sit next to one another since we tend to antagonize each other for no good reason. For example I would cut the deck for John to deal and he would pick it up and start shuffling. The first time or two I think he just didn't know what he was doing. After I yelled at him he did it on purpose for the remainder of the night.

Back to the hand, I decided I'd raise blind and popped it to 3xbb. He called blind. I bet about half pot, still blind, on the flop and he called. On the turn I had to look. I had nothing, but I figured if I bet after looking he would assume I had a hand and at least look at his. I don't know why I thought that because he's a stubborn bastard and would have called any bet out of principle. He called both my turn and river bets. I had picked up nothing and he paired one of his hole cards so I erased all of my earnings on the night on that hand.

In other gaming news, for the geeks out there reading this, I'd highly recommend the board game Carcassonne

Originally posted at blog.pokerwords.com