Poker Face
growing up trying to guess what’s on the other side of the pack of playing cards
In childhood, my sister, my mother and I would sometimes use a regular pack of playing cards to test our psychic abilities. We’d usually do it after several rounds of playing card games, either blackjack or poker. It may not seem particularly appropriate to teach little girls how to play poker, but my mother was a big fan of poker, and apparently she thought it best for us to know how the rules of the game were played while we were still little, and playing with small stakes, before we grew up and lost actual money.
To my mother, whether a royal flush should beat a straight flush and that four of a kind should beat three of a kind were facts that needed to learned as early as possible, either because she hoped that we would be able to finance our college education by being card sharks or, more likely, so that she would have someone to play with. It’s no fun having to explain the rules every time you play with someone, so we had lessons before most games. The rules are not so hard to learn when you start at an early age.
We’d play for pennies, or, more usually, for poker chips. My mother would usually win, or, less frequently, my sister did, who was four years older than me and better at absorbing the rules of play. She also had a longer…
