Here’s a poker article that I could relate to – we’ll probably get slapped around a bit for republishing it – but I thought it was worth sharing.

It’s called “Here’s $200 darling, buy some new genes!” and it’s by Inside Edger and all round poker trooper, James Hipwell.

I’ve been a lying, cheating scumbag for quite a while now. Or so my girlfriend tells me, sometimes even in a good-natured way. Without wishing to dwell on my multifarious faults she accepts many things about me that others wouldn’t but what she finds absolutely deplorable is my current obsession with poker.

I mean, why? My claims that it’s merely a card game, and one based on skill rather than luck, always fall on deaf ears. What does her strict Presbyterian upbringing find so offensive about it? Obviously she doesn’t want me to splurge my monthly bankroll on one evening of no-limit hold’em but it’s not like she’s even particularly pleased on the few occasions that I do win.

Most women are pre-programmed, normally by their mothers, to loathe games of chance. Normally, if you delve that far into people’s family histories you will find a gambler lurking somewhere. Tales of these unlucky blighters, who more often than not blew the family fortune in a game of brag or something, have travelled down the years to play havoc generations later. They exist as cautionary tales and woe betide anyone in a family 200 years later who might just show the smallest sign that he has inherited the fatal gambling gene.

I didn’t ask my girlfriend whether there had been gamblers in her family, thinking it must be a given. Why the irrational hatred of the beautiful game on the baize? But what I did do was try to give her a sense of why I enjoyed playing poker so much.

I told her about the adrenalin-pumping, mind-lazering buzz of poker. I talked about how part of the thrill of poker is not just winning or losing, but the little shifts of power that you have with your opponents to try and show them who’s boss.

But even I’m bound to admit that at the end it all comes down to money. Let’s face it – not playing for money isn’t an option and that’s what our loved ones really can’t stand. People who cheerily suggest, “Hey, let’s play for matchsticks!” miss the point entirely – unless you’re living in an ice age and you’re playing for the last box of matches on Earth. The whole thrill of poker is intimately tied to financial risk.

If there’s no real risk, everyone bluffs, no one folds, and the best hand always wins. Snoooooore. The whole point of the game is that. Often, the best hand loses. It’s the best players who wins. It’s all about reading people, deceit, bravado, and self-control. So the fact that my hands shake perceptibly with excitement when I draw a full house is probably one reason I rarely have much luck in the game. That and the fact that I keep revealing my tells!

I’d be better off it poker were just a fad for me, a passing fancy I’d eventually set aside for more mature pursuits, like bowls or bridge. But while the World Series of Poker may very well follow Pot Black into the museum of pop culture curiosities, another generation’s way of creating sporting celebrities out of middle aged men with beer bellies, I’m afraid my love affair is going to live on. I guess my only option is to get better – to save my relationship at the very least.

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