Poker Table Chatter: Clinton And Blacks
AT the poker table, a conversation is being struck up:
“Where are you from?” she asks.
“New York City.”
“New York City! How about that. We’re from Arkansas! What do you all think about Mrs. Clinton up there?”
Riding the F-Train is prepared for this small talk. He’s been reading up.
Before leaving New York, I read something somewhere… that claimed that most of Arkansas thinks Bill and Hillary Clinton are gods. Never, under any circumstances, should you say anything negative about the Clintons to someone from Arkansas…
“We hate her,” the old woman states emphatically.”Yep! They’re real popular in Niggertown. Well, that’s what *we* call it.”
The conversation gets worse, or better from there on in. The old woman turns out to a rabid bigot. RTFT wants out of the conversation.
The Poker Anorak understands. Making small talk can be poker hell.
Unless you are on the pull – and the aforesaid woman might have been the oldest swinger in town – the best thing is to talk only when betting.
Of course, our man at the baize is in the US, where people feel the need to talk to strangers in lifts. It might be why in the US it’s legal to carry a gun.
Playing poker online means you negotiating a few trolls on the message boards, but they can be managed.
If you want to see how fun the web writers can be, buy Private Eye magazine, wherein the Poker Anorak (in Anorak II guise) is compiling “From The Message Boards”.
Avoid chatter.
There can be no winners…
May 20th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
OMG! I’m going to totally drop the Satyricon persona and say:
“WE’RE NOT WORTHY!”
I read PE, of course, why else would I not be on here, but since 2005 I have had the misfortune to work on fora, especially those nasty grubby football fora, full of the hang them high it’s the only language they understand brigade.
Valiantly I argued against the people that had apparently no awareness of such words as THEIR (There) or ALLOWED (Aloud) BORED (Board) as three examples.
Don’t forget those quaint Americanisms like Purposefully, when we have a perfectly good word in deliberately already and before that, the endless debates over the man charged for defending his own home against the burglars, and of course, Maddie McCann and what paragons of English virtue that the parents are vs the dagos *Bingo!*
Basically I’ve very, very much enjoyed the “From The Message Boards” features in the last 3 or so PE’s. They were the funniest thing in there for me, because you do it so well, after like me years and years of having to read that garbage as a “job”.
In the end I resigned and then got myself banned from various places, my version of strapping myself to the mast, and now I am an almost sane person again, just reading the message boards and blogs rather than kidding myself that I’m in some sort of blogging democracy…
Seriously, well done whoever it is/you guys, it was very funny and theraputic to read so far…