devastated

Esther’s Weekly Writing Prompt — The Poker Game

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Esther Chilton’s Writing Prompt this week is cards.

Another Thursday night rolled around, and another weekly card game with my five poker buddies. This was, of course, back when we were all recent college graduates holding down our first real jobs and not earning that much money, so the stakes at the poker game were modest, just nickel-dime-quarter.

And not only were the stakes modest by today’s standards — typically winning or losing forty bucks at poker night were the extremes — the games were rather simple. No Texas Hold’em, no wild card games, no split the pot games like high-low. Just straight stud poker, five card or seven card.

I wasn’t having a very good night. I was probably $25 bucks in the hole, and it was getting close to the end of the night. All I needed was a few good hands to maybe break even for the night.

The dealer called seven-card stud, a classic poker game where each player is dealt seven cards — three face down and four face up — and aims to make the strongest five-card hand, using only those cards.

We each put in our 5¢ antes and the dealer started dealing the cards. My two face down cards were a jack and a 10 and my face up card was another jack. Okay, I was off to a strong start with a pair of jacks. I was third in the betting and after the first guy bet a dime, the second guy said “I’ll see your dime and bump it a quarter.”

That made the bet for me at 35¢ and feeling a little cocky with my pair of jacks, I said, “I’ll see you 35 and raise it a quarter.” That meant that each of the other three guys at the table had to put in 60¢ to stay in the game, which they did. So after the first round of betting plus the 30¢ ante, the pot stood at $3.90.

Then the second up card was dealt. I got another 10, so I already had two pairs, jacks over tens. Whoa, I was feeling heady. Betting in the second round started with a guy with a king showing. He bet a quarter. The next two guys each raised it a quarter, making my bet 75¢ to stay in. I bumped it another quarter to a dollar, and the next two guys each threw in a dollar to stay in the game. So now, after just two rounds of betting, the pot was already up to $9.90.

My third and fourth up cards were shit, but I had a jack and a ten in the hole and a jack and a ten on the table. There was only one other guy with a pair showing on the table, and that was a pair of sixes. The third and fourth rounds of betting got even rougher, with everyone staying in the game but with multiple rounds of bumping by a quarter, the pot was up to about $40 before the seventh card, a face down card, was dealt.

My face down card was a third jack. I had a fucking full house, jacks high! I knew I had a winner. On the last round of betting, two of the six players dropped out, so after the last round of betting the pot was almost $55, the biggest pot of the night, and with my full house, I was sure the pot was mine.

Do you remember the guy with the king showing who started the second round of betting at a quarter? Well, his first two face down cards were also kings. Now I honestly don’t know what the odds are that the last card he was dealt, his third face down card in the hand, would also be a king, but the odds are quite slim.

Yet on that night when I was dealt a jacks over tens full house, this other player was dealt four kings.

I was devastated.

OLWG #391 — The Fire

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“It’s my fault, Danny,” Harriet said. “I was so angry with Tom. I know he was devastated after Tuesday’s election, but since then he was just sitting on the couch in the living room staring at the TV, which wasn’t even on. He would get up every now and then to go to the bathroom and to get a beer and to make himself a sandwich. But he hadn’t uttered a word to me since almost midnight on Tuesday night. He hasn’t even been sleeping in our bed. It was like I was living with a ghost.”

“This wasn’t your fault, Harriet,” Danny, Tom’s older brother said, giving Harriet a brotherly hug. “How could you have known that he would fall asleep without putting out the candle?”

“I couldn’t have know but I was so angry with him that I left last night and went to stay at my sister’s place,” Harriet said, tears running down her cheeks. “If had been at home, this wouldn’t have happened and Tom would still be alive.

“You don’t know that, Harriet,” Danny said. “You don’t know what time the fire started and if you had been here and had been sleeping, you, too, might have perished in the fire.” Danny hugged Harriet again, but this time it was anything but brotherly. When he moved in to kiss his sister-in-law on the lips, she pushed him away.

“Will it always be this hard?” Harriet asked rhetorically.

This post is in respone to a prompt from Aooga at The New Unofficial Online Writer’s Guild. Aooga’s prompt is called OLWG and he posts two or three prompts from his vast collection of writing prompts weekly. Our task is to choose one of them, choose all of them, or choose none of them and incorporate them into a story or poem. This week, his three prompts are:

  1. living with your ghost
  2. he fell asleep and didn’t put out the candle
  3. will it always be this hard?

Image credit: shutterstock.com.