A few Fallsview regulars and I celebrated our birthdays a week ago. By some quirk all four of us were born in late August, and we share some traits, being late summer babies, I’m convinced of it. We’re all pretty decent poker players, and we all love NFL football, mixed martial arts, Dean Martin, voluptuous women and the short stories of Ernest Hemingway.

Anyway, we decided to celebrate by eating at a Brazilian churrascaria not far from the casino. Churrasco is Brazilian-style barbecue. Waiters in gaucho-style outfits serve grilled meat on long sword-like skewers. They came at us fast and furious shortly after we sat down. And we took them on, grinning as we dug into all that roasted flesh. Three kinds of lamb, four of beef, pork in several interchangeable manifestations, and chicken, veal, mutton, goat – Jesus, they brought us so much meat in the first five minutes, and we were so hungry and it was so delicious, that we gorged ourselves like wolves on a moose carcass with hunters and hounds nearby, swallowing big chunks of meat with barely a chew so they could make their escape into the woods.

I looked at my friends – Bri, Lance, Perry – and the sight of them with their blood-and-grease-spattered lips and chins, their chests heaving, their expressions at once sheepish and bilious, filled me with disgust. This is what we were in the end. Fuck all the grains and nuts nonsense: we were carnivores at heart. But poor ones, or should I say weak ones, out of practice perhaps. But if we were forced to dine this way every day, in time our digestive tracts would adjust and we’d be able to give the gauchos more bang for our buck. As it stood, my distended stomach bulged my shirt, straining the buttons, and my discomfort sharpened as my stomach began the big job of churning all that meat. The others also experienced similar results, judging from their slightly moist and despairing demeanours, for how would we play poker with all this meat in our bellies? Would we, like wolves who lingered at the carcass and now found themselves in the line of fire, disgorge all that meat (as has been observed with wolves in the wild), in order to lighten our loads? No.

Of course the gauchos, well aware of the result of gorging so much meat in so little time, immediately slowed down their assault with the skewers, and even though we took this as a part of typical Niagara Falls chiselling, none of us could imagine eating any more meat. Lance, weighing in at 275 pounds (at least), did manage to jam down his throat one last chunk of charred pork and when he began choking on it Bri immediately came to his help, insisting he knew the Heimlich and attempting to put his arms around Lance’s prodigious girth, with no success. I wanted to help Lance, but I have a ruptured disc situation. Perry said something like “Cup his nuts, Bri,” but I must have misheard, for the fragment had no meaning in that context.

Luckily Lance was able to self-administer the Heimlich by standing over a chair and slamming his chest down on the back of it, thus forcing the obstruction out with a violent spray of snot and phlegm.

After all the excitement we went to the casino and sat down at the fast 5-5 table. An annoying regular named Sammy, a middle-aged man with white streaks in his hair and wise-guy pretensions, who actually bears a remote resemblance to Paulie Walnuts from The Sopranos was there. He talks tough, but he’s also the biggest whiner in the casino when he’s not catching cards or when he loses hands to people with marginal holdings. Sammy is pretty much your classic rock, playing only premium hands and then expecting to win with those hands. He loves nothing more than taking down a small pot with his pocket aces or kings. But if you want to see someone tilt out, just beat Sammy with a junk hand when he’s holding big – just crack his aces with a little 8-9 suited and watch the guy come apart at the seams.

Anyway, we had Sammy between us that night, and you know, we were trying to bully him a little, it’s true. I won’t call it collusion, but when one of the others raised behind Sammy and he flat-called, someone always put the squeeze play on him. And even though we all squirmed with discomfort as our bodies struggled to digest a collective total of about 10 pounds of meat, we focused on battering poor Sammy around and taking his chips down. And he’s not the kind of man who liked to rebuy. No, if he’s having a bad night he packs it in.

Then he won an all-in against both Perry and myself. I had no business playing my J-8 suited but Perry had pocket queens. Sammy had A-K and he hit the king on the flop. Then Sammy proceeded to win some five or six hands in a row, with premium holdings for the most part, but he also won with a junk hand that straightened out on the river, and showed us a 7-2 bluff at one time. Then, with his big chip stack, he started raising relentlessly, and whenever someone took a stand against him, even with a better hand, Sammy hit flops and turns and caught ridiculous river cards. It became maddening. And more maddening because the whiny Sammy, so morose and cynical when he’s running bad, was giggling and having a gay old time at our expense. And the more we tried to dent his stack the bigger it grew.

I’m telling you, the four of us were aching to take him down, even a notch. If one of the others had suggested we drag him out back and give him the boots I might have agreed. But it happens, some nights. The poker gods reward someone and we cannot fathom why – yet who are we to question why? We felt, because of our birthdays, that all of us were “due,” and perhaps this was the problem after all. All four of us could not win.

In the end, Sammy wound up giving some of the chips back, not a lot mind you. And he remained pretty sanguine, somewhat surprising. And then he said something like, “What’s with you guys tonight? You didn’t eat churrasco did you?” He glanced around the table. “Ah – you did.” He chuckled as he adjusted his chip stacks. “You did eat churrasco.”

Emile Frendo of the Honeymoon City is a semi-professional poker player and winner of the 2006 Pirate Poker Open Championship.