A chance to make up for the Bop-It fiasco. I decided to teach my 13 year old niece how to play poker. She had a lot of Christmas money to lose and I had to recoup some of the losses incurred from buying presents for my dull/interesting family.
Some may think it is irresponsible to teach a 13 year old to gamble, but I had the full consent of her father, who was also playing and who was also hoping to make some money from his poker-novice daughter. Ha ha ha. We are evil.
In the end we played for match-sticks rather than money which was a bit less fun, but a match-stick is still a match-stick and if I won enough I would maybe build myself a model of a sailing ship to wear as a hat (only the most obsessive reader will begin to make any sense out of that self-indulgent cross-reference).
With all my poker experience I should surely wipe the floor with these idiots, but although I took home the 120 matches from game 1, my niece suddenly grasped the game and won the next two games easily.
I didn't mind being beaten at Bop-It. It is a stupid game with no real use in the outside world, but to be humbled at my chosen sport of poker was a different matter. And yet there was a part of me thinking, I could take this poker genius around the bars and dives of London and clean up. No-one would expect this tiny, semi-French child to excel at this pastime of the cynical and deperate. This could be like "The Color of Money". I could become a millionaire. Which I would need to now as I was already up to my eye-balls in match-stick debt.
I restored some pride by winning the fourth match match (geddit), but as midnight approached and the third can of lager settled in my bloated stomach I was knocked out of the final game.
If my niece beat my brother she would be crowned the queen of both Bop-It and Poker (and I seriously doubt there is anyone else in the world who excels in both of these games).
Thankfully by brother fluked a straight on the river (get with the lingo, I'm not going to patronise you by explaining what that means) which kept him in the tournament and then went on to win a nail-biting final hand.
So I was equal with my niece and so finally had not been defeated by one of my siblings' children.
Though when you take into account that this was the first time she had ever played and that I've been competing seriously for over a year, it puts my pride at our draw into some kind of context.
