My friend Gaylord (named after the pitcher, no call for snickering) was understandably upset. Sometimes things happen in poker that simply transcend the understanding, that couldn´t be foreseen, nay, in their most grotesque and horrific manifestations couldn´t be conceived of even in a paranoid delirium. Gaylord is a solid player and a stand-up human being. When he comes face to face with the inexplicable, he turns to the skies and laments to the poker gods, who remain mute to his suffering, and by their silence torment him further, demonstrating to him that they are not only active, these gods, but they are cruel, cruel and unjust.

We had been playing a $5-10 ring game at a private poker club in a godforsaken place called Thorold South, which if you ask me is not a place at all. As Gertrude Stein famously said about Oakland, CA, “there is no there there.” The fellows at this game seemed to suffer collectively from homozygosity. Perhaps the fact that all of them had overbites and receding chins led me to draw this hypothesis. But I could easily be wrong. Then again, they all shared a trait which I found somewhat off-putting, and which thrust me back to my original hypothesis: they all had very short thumbs. As peculiar as this sounds, imagine how odd it felt to be playing with a bunch of guys, handling cards, counting out chips, doing all those hand-things poker players do to combat nerves, stress and boredom, or the hand-things some players do to dragoon opponents (making a fist and shaking it is a good example of this; or pointing an index finger to the temple, thumb extended, or swiping a finger across the throat and mouthing the words, You’re fucking dead, donkey, are also excellent examples of this aggressive species of dumb show) – doing all this hand-stuff with abnormally stunted thumbs.

Anyway, Gaylord and I maintained our composure and started stacking some chips at the expense of these cousins, or kinfolk (I asked at some point if they were related and received no response except some throat clearing and kicking under the table), who clearly all read a book on how not to play poker and somehow thought it was a book on how to play poker. That being said, you and I know, dear readers, that sometimes even an imprudent and risible strategy can work during a given game, so fall the cards. Sometimes King-Anything suited becomes a monster in the hands of those few unscrupulous or asinine players, who are very fond of King-Anything suited, and play it all the time, and lose with it most of the time, but now and then the poker gods wink at each other and determine that a certain good player must be humbled for his apparent hubris, or that a total donkey must be rewarded for having faith in his system – i.e., that faith must be rewarded, for without faith there is no poker. And thus the King-Anything suited becomes a colossus, crushing everything in its path.

So Gaylord, who as mentioned was doing well, came into one hand swinging. He raised it five times the blinds from under the gun and everyone folded except for the big blind, a fellow in a blue plaid work shirt with the name tag “Junior” slapped on his breast pocket. Junior sat there for a full minute, delicately flicking his chips with his thumbnail and then finally announced a re-raise. Gaylord pushed all-in and Junior insta-called, jumping excitedly out of his seat. Gaylord winked at me and flipped up two black aces. With a yelp of jubilation Junior turned over K-7 of diamonds to a chorus of cheers from his cousins. I looked at Gaylord and a nerve in his cheek twitched. The flop came Q-4-2 of diamonds. Boom.

Junior hooted and howled and the others copied him like dogs under a yellow moon. Junior gathered up his chips and said that he knew he was going to flop a flush, he just knew. One of the others, who looked like his twin brother, save that he was a foot shorter than him, though their heads were identical in circumference and mass, went to give him a high-five but slapped him in the face instead. Junior didn’t get angry. He burst into laughter, and the others laughed as well. Indeed they all found it so funny they all went to high-five Junior and all slapped him about the face.

A wisp of smoke curled out from one of Gaylord’s ears and I thought I’d better keep an eye on him in case he combusted. We continued playing for another hour or so. I stayed out of big pots and nickle-and-dimed my way to a healthy stack. Gaylord did pretty much the same, keeping his game tight and not getting too silly with these hillbillies. Then, just as I was getting notions of cashing out and driving back to the Falls, Gaylord came out firing from under the gun, five times the blinds again. This time he wore a look of steely determination so riveting I felt there was no way the poker gods could deny him. Junior went all-in immediately and Gaylord called, and this time he leaped out of his chair and after Junior showed his K-3 suited in clubs, he slapped his black pocket aces down on the table. No way he was going to lose with the black rockets this time, no way. The poker gods aren’t that whimsically cruel, are they? Boom. Three clubs on the flop and Junior hopping around like a hebephrenic kangaroo. But at least Gaylord had hope. No, not really. The fourth club didn’t come and Gaylord’s head fell forward in defeat and Junior and his cousins celebrated New Year´s Eve in July.

“I wanted to kill the fucker,” Gaylord whispered between sips of water. He wasn’t well. He was in bed with mosquito netting draped around it, running a fever and gibbering as he experienced some kind of debilitating nervous disorganization. His eyes vibrated as he told me to get him more water. “Please,” he said beseechingly, “I beg of you.” That was the least I could do, and I couldn’t help but choke up as I ran the water at the tap. It was too much, all this suffering. I felt I had probably lost a friend. I couldn’t see Gaylord recovering from this malaise. I clenched my fist and, fighting back tears, raised it to the sky and shook it with feeling.

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