I love all card games. Gin, UNO, War, Spit, old maid, blackjack, Go Fish—basically any game where I can slap and scream in a social setting. Have you played Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza? You most certainly should. I’m so competitive a bridge teacher once told me, “Helen, we don’t bid out of spite.”
I am the kind of woman who’s known as a card. “She’s a card” is Southern Lady Code for “She’ll wear your lampshade like a foam cowboy hat and ride your couch cushion like the Gilley’s mechanical bull.”
But I’m not that wild. What I am wild enough to do, every chance that I get, is to walk into a casino poker room that is 97 percent full of men, put my chips on the table, and play.
And then, I am very quiet. I don’t speak unless spoken to. I let my bets speak for me to say raise or all in. A poker room is the one place on earth I don’t feel like I have to entertain. I am never more present, more focused, more frightened, or having more fun.
The table felt is sexier than velvet under my fingertips. The chips can be so deliciously filthy they stick together like loose peppermints at the bottom of my purse. The cards are stiffer than engraved invitations. The banter is saltier than Samuel L. Jackson’s.
I know a poker player who has it written in his last will and testament that another player we know isn’t allowed to speak at his funeral because every time he opens his mouth, something god-awful falls out. But I love hearing things that might otherwise be censored in a Pardon my French, ma’am kind of way. And I love that poker has introduced me to people I might not otherwise have met.
Just in the casinos of Biloxi, Mississippi, alone, I’ve gotten the stories behind bullet wounds, hook hands, missing fingers from farm equipment, and forearm portraits of dead mothers and children, and I have seen more suited knuckles and ace-up-the-sleeve tattoos than I can remember. I watched a man who looked like an MMA fighter drink virgin strawberry daiquiris for eight hours straight. I met another guy who considered it a good omen that when his house burned to the ground, his Beau Rivage casino card turned up unscathed in the ashes. I sat beside a retired Kentucky police chief who told me that people are killed for one of three reasons: sex, money, or drugs.
“At our table,” he whispered, “who do you think could kill someone?”
The men we were playing with looked like a mix of Golden Bachelor rejects, correctional officers, and gambling addicts not-so-anonymous.
I guessed, “You?”
“Good guess,” he replied with a laugh.
“Not me?” I asked.
“Not in a million years,” he said.
Most women who play poker are underestimated because of the way we look. Meaning, no matter the hoodies or machismo (me, I wear pearls), we still look like women. But I’ve met my share of female killers at card tables: a chess champion; a district attorney who put away one of the most gruesome murderers in the Bronx; and innumerable mamas and grandma-mas who would not hesitate to spank you into next Sunday.
All of us would tell you that strip poker is for suckers. You play poker for one reason: money.
That’s what I teach my beginner students, most of them women (but also sometimes children whose parents pay me half the going rate of an Upper East Side SAT tutor; or a group of three to five married couples who win a night of my services in a charity auction). A little sister at a tableful of ten-year-old boys learning how to play limit Hold’em before heading off to summer camp took my money-grubbing lesson to heart so quickly that she started yelling, “Gucci!” every time she scooped a buck and quarter pot.
The boys didn’t particularly like this, but the first time she apologized for beating them, I made her pay me a dollar. She didn’t like this, but she never again apologized for winning.
Only my female students ever apologize, and I do my damnedest to break that bad habit, a faux pas I consider worse than touching another player’s stack, throwing cards, or manspreading in the five seat. Because here’s the thing: You play poker to win. Winning feels good. Women should not apologize for making themselves feel good.
