12.21.07
I needed something to do after Work
I worked during the day so to entertain myself at night, I started hanging out at Intermountain Billiards in Boise playing pool and occasionally playing some poker. I was 19-20 years old, making good money, and not a very good poker player with plenty of gamble. With that combination I put many bad beats on my opponents but usually ended up going broke. When you are young you have no fear, especially when you have plenty of money. This makes me smile now days when all the young guns think that I am tight because I don’t ram and jam like they do. I have been there, done that.
Back in those days we only played no-limit 5 card stud and no-limit lowball. The typical buy-in for a player was $20-$50. It doesn’t sound like a lot of money now but this was in 1972. A lot of players who bought in short would just shove all-in whenever they played a hand (same as the short stacks do now). So there was a lot of all-ins in those games. The blinds were either $1 or $2, with anyone at the table being able to straddle and someone else re-straddling. The straddle back then made it double the straddle to come in. For example if the blinds was $1 and $2, it was $4 to come in. If someone straddled for $4 anywhere on the table it was $8 minimum to come in and so forth. Which is unlike most of the games today where the only place you can straddle is in first position and it isn’t double the straddle. So, you can see sometimes back then, the games had lots of action.
