Queer Luck: Poker Stories from the New York Sun

by David A. Curtis

“Was I philosophizing? Well, perhaps I was. One of the youngsters asked me to join in a game of poker a little while ago, and I was going to do it, for I like poker when the stakes are not too heavy, but he told me they were playing with a joker.

“Now, they may get up a game of poker one of these days with high, low, big and little casino, and the right and left bowers in it, and it may prove to be a game that will be much liked by those who play it. Certainly, I will have nothing against it. But when I sit in at the game I want to play it as I learned it. So I declined the invitation.”

“Do you play it as you learned it?” asked the other. “When I learned, four aces couldn’t be beaten.”

“I must admit that point to be well taken,” said the gray-haired young-looking man, “for I can remember, myself, when a straight flush was an unknown hand. In fact, the first one I ever saw came near costing two lives. But the straight flush, though it was in its day a modern improvement, was a legitimate development and not a change in the game. The principle underlying draw poker is that a hand is valuable exactly in proportion to the difficulty encountered in getting it—that is, according to the smallness of the chance you have of holding it. Fours were supposed to be the hand that was the hardest to get, and so fours were the winning hand. When somebody discovered that the chances of holding a straight flush were fewer than the chances of holding fours, the straight flush took its place strictly in accordance with the rules of the game as already formulated. The only reason it was not played from the first was that it had not been recognized as a distinct hand before. If somebody should discover a new hand—that is, a new combination of cards with a positive, individual character of its own, sharply distinguishing it from any other combination—that new hand might be admitted at its proper value without changing the rules.”

“There is a certain amount of interest in what you say, no doubt,” said the man with his heels on the fender, “but it occurs to me that there may be even more in the narration of the circumstances under which you made the acquaintance of a straight flush.”

“Now a ‘blaze,’” continued the other, “is certainly a distinct hand, but it seems to be a characterless sort of a thing, and not entitled to much respect. And the same may be said of the alternated straight. It is true that an effort was made to introduce the blaze, but it didn’t meet with much favor. I don’t think it is played anywhere now, and I never heard of anybody seriously proposing to play alternated straights. Come to think of it, the straight was not a part of the old original game, and was not universally played until within a few years. I don’t imagine, though I never figured on it, that it is any harder to get than an alternated straight, but it has a stronger character of its own. That proves what I said, doesn’t it?”

“About those two lives,” said the other, lazily moving his heels a little further apart.

“It was up in the pine woods of Minnesota. I went there one winter to escape a galloping consumption that my doctor predicted, and had secured a job with Brown & Martin, a firm that had several lumber camps in the woods. There was a gang of about forty men in our camp, and there was nothing particularly unusual about them, excepting perhaps that there was rather more card playing at night than the bosses liked to have. I don’t know that it is prohibited in any of the camps—certainly it was not in those days; but gambling is discouraged, for the men’s sakes as well as for the bosses’, and as a rule there isn’t much going on.

“The lumbermen are very impatient of restraint, though, and no intelligent foreman interferes with them much outside of working hours, and as there were half a dozen men in our camp who were inveterate gamblers, the infection spread until there were four or five poker games going on every night. Our foreman was a Yankee from Maine, a strapping big fellow, who did not play himself, and strongly disapproved of it, but he had a great amount of discretion, and beyond speaking his mind freely he did not try to stop it.

“This was thirty years ago, mind you, and, as I said a moment ago, the straight was not played everywhere. We played it, however, for there were a good many there who had become familiar with it, and they insisted on it, and the few who were disposed to grumble at it as a new-fangled notion submitted, though not with the best grace. If you remember, the straight, as played then, only beat two pairs. Its value as the lowest complete hand had not yet been recognized.”