Unfriendly Stakes

[Brown_k11]

They tell you old friends make the best poker pals. Well, whoever said that first couldn't crawl his way through a dust storm in the panhandle. I mean, there's just nobody I hate playing with more than a group of giddy gooses, all liquored up and discussing old times around some poker table in the basement.
Unfortunately, that's the only kind of poker a lot of folks ever get to play. If you live in Longmont, Colorado for example you just can't go advertising in the local paper for players. Often these games end up with a collection of aunts and uncles and some brother-in-law who is visiting the neighbors up the street.
A lot of friendly games are just casual contests among old pals who struggled through college together. There's a similarity, I think, and the bridge parties for the neighborhood housewives. Poker games of this sort tend to be loose and informal. Rules are rules, but the boys seem to piece them together whenever it seems necessary, rather than thinking them out in advance.
And that part brings me to my main objection with "too friendly" poker games.
Usually these games start out small. But week after week the taste for higher stakes poker beckons. Pretty soon a game that started off dollar limit is now twenty dollar limit with all sorts of wild cards thrown in, and before you know it George is writing Bill a check for $2,500. And soon things become serious fast.
Let me tell you, there's just nothing that will cool down a friendship as quickly as one buddy going out to buy new carpet with the money that was supposed to go toward purchasing the loser's vacation property on the lake.
When the stakes increase, those gentleman's agreements about making up the rules as you go along suddenly seem dangerous.
There are plenty of arguments at these "friendly" games. Two years ago, I was invited to a friends for dinner. There was a poker party going on downstairs. Some of my old friends from college were seated comfortably around an old dining room table. At first, there was a maximum $5 bet. Four hours later it was a pot limit game with a $10 blind. If you know much about pot-limit you'll recognize that this can get mighty expensive.
My friend Alex, who sort of got roped into the game to begin with, was losing $1,500. His wife came downstairs.
"How much?" she screamed upon learning of her husbands disaster. "I'll win it back. Just sit there and be calm," he instructed
But she would have none of it. "Let's just say good-bye to these nice people and head on home." Her voice was heavy with sarcasm. So Alex left like a dog trying to hide his tail. Luckily I hadn't agreed to play, because two very vocal arguments popped up on the following hands. One was about whether Paul had the right to grab his hand back out of the discards.
Well sir the pot was around $1,200, and everyone was very serious about Paul having a dead hand.
"But the same thing happened to Chris the very first hand we played tonight. And we let him play the hand." Paul protested.
The host said, " Yeah and we was playing for $5 then." and that settled the argument.
Here's a little advice: Decide in advance whether the kind of poker you are going to be playing is social or serious. If its for social play painless stakes and make up the rules as you go. But if it's serious, define the rules,forget your friendships, and play to win