Hopkinsville Kentuckian. [volume] (Hopkinsville, Ky.) 1889-1918, 1897-06-04
A GAME OF POKER.

GA man who sits into a game OF
poker in a region that is new to him
without first finding out the rules Of
the game as it is played in said region
is liable to stack up against worse
trouble than did the British buck
soldier who dumped into a Moham-
,medan joss-house with his boots and
spurs on" said an old Forty-niner
at a planked shad dinner down the
Potomac the other day. For there's
a heap of different kinds of poker
played in this country; and the worst
of it is that the man who plays the
kind of a game he was raised on in
his own section of the country is al
ways blind to the beauties of the en-
tirely different game that he drifts
into when he gets away from his own
neck of the woods. Poker is a good
deal like Injun talk | can talk pref
ty fair Modoc Injun; but 1 guess if
I'D talk Modoc to a bad Siwash or
to an impetuous Ogalalla Sioux he'd
begin to figure on how my hair
would do for tepee-lining. And
there's more mixed brands of draw
poker played around the United
States and territories than there are
,Injun dialects.
81 once saw a game Of poker that
Resulted nrettv seriously for both
players on account of the lack Of
an understanding between them be-
fore the game started as to Just what
the hands were worth. 1t was in
Vallejo, back in '67. Vallejo was
then the hottest town in Napa coun-
ty, on account of the immense eX-
pectations all hands had of the riches
they were going to make out of their
grape ranches, which about this time
became thicker in Napa than truck
farms in Connecticut. Every man
who owned a grape ranch figured
ON buying a yacht and going around
the Horn to New York in it inside
of a few years, and they we're all so
confident of eventual wealth that
they recklessly blew in their money
when the grape boom was at its
height; they thought that in a few
years the California wine-making
business would pan out so big that
they could afford to have a little fun
with the few thousands of dollars in
ready coin that most of them had on
hand after getting their vines in the
ground. They had their fun all
right, but the fancy-card men from
San Francisco got the bulk Of their
cash. San Francisco is only 30
odd miles from Vallejo, and when
the San Francisco sure-thing dealers
and riflers heard Of the ight-hearted
skittishness, not to say damphOolish-
ness, Of the Napa grape ranchers,
they Aocked into Vallejo, and for a
couple of years made it into a good
limitation of Angels Camp-until
the phylloxera and black rot dashed
she hopes of the sanguine viticultur-
5sts and cleaned them out altogether
"But this game of mixed poker l
was going to tell you about: was in
Lou Prindley's big Vallejo faro mill
one Sunday afternoon-for the game
was as wide open on Sundays as it
was on week days-trying to pump
n little sense into the fool head Of a
friend of mine who had chubbed
away nearly every dollar he had in
the world at Vallejo's brace games,
when one of the look-outs, who knew
of the interest l took in watching a
good game of poker, although Inever
played the game except with friends,
came over to where | was standing
and said:
"Lou's got good game of draw
ON with a new man upstairs; go up
and take it in
'Now, in those days Lou Prindley
-he was shot in Arizona Is years
ago-was just about the warmest
poker player on the Pacific slope.
lie ran faro games in most of the
big towns in California for the money
there was in it, but he played draw
poker for the fun of the thing; and
he always played on the level, fol-
ne wasn't a man who cared to mix
business with pleasure, and he
wouldn't have found any entertain
uent in stacking the cards and deal
ing from the bottom and middleinany
game that he got into just to enjoy
the study Of percentages.
@When went upstairs to the poker