Category: Poker

Poker lore is full of unsavory degenerates. Images abound of those who play poker gambling away their rent money or cheating to win. Poker venues are imagined as mafia-backed casinos and smoke filled basements hosting illegal games. Check out the best poker movies and you’ll find plenty of shady characters and less-than-noble behaviors.

This, however, is not the poker world we have come to know and love.

Poker is a pastime for a wide variety of people. It’s an avocation, a hobby, that engages people in a mental and social activity, much like bridge or golf. There are definitely potential downsides to playing poker, but anyone can pursue poker as part of a healthy lifestyle if they attend to these pitfalls.

Play Poker as a Friendly Competition

The typical poker venue, like our go-to local room Hampton Falls in New Hampshire, has a feel of competitive camaraderie. Everyone is trying their best to play poker well and to win. Ninety-five percent of players are gracious and understand both the skill and luck aspects of the game. There is an overriding atmosphere of “we’ve come together to share this activity we all love”. There’s a real feeling of being an insider in a world that those who don’t play can never understand.

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Paul and I are heading to Las Vegas this week for the 2018 World Series of Poker (WSOP). No, we are not laying down $10,000 and playing in the Main Event. While that is a bucket list item for us, we imagine fulfilling that dream many years down the road. No, we are lucky enough to be heading to Vegas in our role as ambassadors for Advanced Poker Training, the poker training site for which we also blog. APT is holding a WSOP Meet N Greet and they asked us to help represent the site. We did not have to think very hard before saying “hell, yeah!”.

We have been to Vegas a couple of times before and loved it. However, we’ve never been during the World Series of Poker. In planning this trip, we discovered that while the WSOP is in town most casinos suspend their daily tournaments. On our previous trips, The Venetian and the Aria have been our go-to rooms of choice. Both hold regular small stack (less than $200 buy-in) tournaments that we really enjoy. As we planned our current trip, we discovered that both are hosting tournament series this month alongside the WSOP. As we mentioned in our last post, we are currently facing the first college tuition bill for Paul’s older daughter. $1,500 (or even $500) buy-ins are off the table for this trip.

Low Stakes Tournament Options During the WSOP

There are plenty of options to play well-structured low stakes tournaments during the WSOP. For the purposes of this article, we define low stakes as anything at or below $200. If you are looking for such a game, here are your top five options:

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Poker movies just don’t get it right most of the time. Poker is a fascinating game filled with great real life characters. Doyle Brunson, Stu Unger, Phil Hellmuth, Phil Ivey, Scotty Nguyen and Daniel Negreanu to name just a few. What’s even more amazing is that most small stakes poker rooms are filled with more of the same. Complex, interesting characters that can’t possibly be real. Only they are.

Despite such a rich landscape, there are precious few good poker movies.  Sports like boxing, basketball, and baseball have produced a stunning number of good films. But poker seems to be resistant to the movie genre. There may be more good chess films than quality poker movies.  There are a few nuggets out there, and we hope the recent release of Molly’s Game brings renewed interest, but it won’t take you very long to work your way through the entire poker oevre.  We think these five movies are the best out there. And we’ll be watching and re-watching them until we can live our own poker travel dream.

5. Big Hand for a Little Lady

Big Hand for a Little Lady portrays the Western archetypal spin on poker with a side of comedy.  The iconic American journey of a couple and their son moving west to buy a farm (of course) near San Antonio is interrupted by a poker game in Laredo (where else?).  Meredith (Henry Fonda) is a recovering gambling addict who wanders into a, you guessed it, saloon. He extracts permission from virtuous wife Mary (Joanne Woodward) to watch a high stakes poker game. You can probably guess where it goes from there.  Meredith enters the game, ends up putting the entire family fortune at risk. Then there is a big hand….and the “little lady” takes over when Meredith suffers a sudden attack.

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