Playing Poker With My Dad

Many girls will remember dancing with their dads at weddings or going to baseball games with their dads in the summers. Not me. Playing poker with my dad is the memory that will stick with me forever.

My dad came down to South Carolina to visit me at college. He did the normal dad stuff, taking me to buy things that I needed; taking me and my friends out to eat and meeting my sorority sisters. I even managed to find him a poker game next door to my dorm with some college guys. The last night my dad was here we got a phone call from a guy we had met at a diner the night before, inviting us to a poker game at his sister's house. My dad immediately got directions and we were on our way.

Now, my dad taught me how to play poker at a very young age. He taught me about checking and calling, about betting and raising. He taught me about bluffing and he taught me what cards were worth playing. I'm pretty sure when I first learned how to count in kindergarten I thought that the numbers went, nine, ten, jack, queen, king. But I hadn't played poker against my dad in a couple years. In fact, when I think back, the last time I remember playing poker with him is about four or five years ago at a traditional Thanksgiving Day poker game.

But here we were, at a small house in Columbia, South Carolina, ready to play poker against each other for real money (well, OK so maybe he leant me the $10, but you know what I mean). We sat down at a table of misfits. The guy across from me was missing his front tooth and had long scraggly hair. The guy to my dad's right was a 300 pound chef at a diner with a deep scratchy voice. His sister sat across from my dad and two other men sat to my left. I had chosen to sit to the left of my dad because he taught me everything I knew, and would therefore be the easiest to read. We all bought in for $10.00 and were given our chips.

Now I know my dad's style of playing. He's a fairly tight player who bluffs occasionally in a crowd of bad players but usually sticks to straight poker, playing good cards and folding bad ones. Knowing this was at a huge advantage to me. I knew that if he bet, he had something good and I should fold if I didn't have at least a pair.

We started playing, the first couple of hands were pretty boring, but I got used to their style of playing and ended up winning a pretty good pot. I took cues from my dad - when he bet I folded if I didn't have good cards, when he checked I bet because I knew it would knock him out if he didn't have good cards. The other players were pretty erratic players that would go all in on a pair of twos, but fold an A high before the flop came out.

One hand came down to me, my father, and the large chef. I had a Qs 8d and I was the big blind so I stayed in for the flop. The flop was 5c, Qd, Ks. I now had a pair of Qs and the action was to my dad. He bet, big. I thought about my pair of Qs and realized there was a K on the flop. He had to have a pair of Kings or he wouldn't have stayed in. I folded. The game continued between my dad and the chef. They eventually revealed their hands and my dad had a pair of fives, while the chef had pocket sevens. I was pissed. I told my dad about my hand and he laughed saying he had "knocked me out of the game" I kept on playing a couple more hands but we left shortly after that. I ended up down by 2 dollars and my dad ended up down by 4. In my mind, this was a huge feat; I had lost less than my dad.

The game of poker wasn't too eventful; it definitely wouldn't have been one to write an article about if I hadn't been sitting next to my dad the entire time. I assumed at the beginning of the game that sitting to the left of my dad was smart idea. I'd be able to win because I'd know how strong his hand was before the action was to me. But I was completely wrong.

The problem was that I was only thinking about beating my dad, not about beating the rest of the players at the table. This was a mistake. I was so busy reading him and figuring him out, that I failed to take into consideration the true strength of my hand relative to everyone else at the table.

My mistake was in focusing too much on one player. I know about reading people and I know that it's important to pay attention to the reactions of other players, but you should never rely solely on reading one other player. I folded a very good hand because I assumed, based on my dad's poker playing, that my hand was not the best at the table. I was wrong. The entire game I spent playing in my dad's shadows and it wasn't until afterwards that I realized how ridiculous that was. I'm a perfectly good poker player. I play often and I win often. Just because my dad was at the table shouldn't have changed that except that I made too big a deal out of beating him. Next time, I'm sitting to his right, watching all the players in the game, and he can follow in my footsteps!

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