"You look a little like a serial killer," the young man continued. He even mentioned the BTK serial murderer in our home state of Kansas. After looking at Dennis Rader's picture, maybe it's time for a full shave.
"You have a facade," the young man explained. "You look sneaky. Now that can be a good thing. You can be sneaky good."
The man said this as we shuffled and dealt cards -- with a WWJD wristband on full display, as in "What Would Jesus Do?" But come to think of it, "sneaky good" can work to your advantage at a poker table. It did for us....
BLINDS: 25/50
IN THE POCKET: K-6 of clubs
The tournament is only a few hands old. We join most of the table in calling, hoping for something big.
ON THE FLOP: Qc-9c-8c
Aha -- something big! We're a flush-flopper! But we're first in line to act, and we want to maximize our potential gains. So we bet 200. Four other players call.
ON THE TURN: 5s
Now it's time to turn up the heat. We bet 1,200.
"Straight?" a man across the table asks as the other opponents keep calling. We say nothing and only look at him. So he keeps talking. "You see, I've got the Ace of clubs...." But then he stops. "But you know, I'm not going to chase it." He folds.
ON THE RIVER: 5h
A pair on the board is potential trouble, because someone might have hit a full house. But we still bet 2,000. That scares two players away. A woman across from us calls, admitting she might regret it. Sure enough -- she does. Our flush had it all along.
We were dealt several potentially big hands tonight. But several of them fell through, and big bets by others ran us away from potential winners. An all-in bet with 7-7 after the one-hour break helped us recover and survive to the semifinal table. But then 7-7 came again -- and our push was topped by someone who made a pair of Kings on the flop.
Our final outcome was 11th place. But we're admittedly feeling mixed emotions as we write this. The young man who compared us to serial killers later admitted he was "jiving" -- saying almost anything that came to his mind, to liven up the table and avoid dead poker silence. Yet after nearly three years of poker nights and almost two years of focused poker ministry, this is the last sort of reaction we'd expect from someone. We'll meditate more on this in a future post.
MINISTRY MOMENT: Before we met that young man, a conversation started at the table over a "card protector" we hadn't used in awhile -- a card promoting a church in Tennessee, which we found at a motel."I once saw a card with something like that," a woman said. "It said, 'Get out of hell free." She added that one had "John 3:16" on the back of it.
That's one of the most famous verses in the Bible, but we shouldn't assume you know what it says. Jesus declares there: "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life."
If you think we're material for a serial killer, remember one thing -- we're all under a death penalty. "Adam brought death to all of us," says I Corinthians 15:22 in the Contemporary English Version. That's due to Adam's sin (Genesis 3:17-19).
But thankfully, the verse doesn't end there. It continues, "....and Christ will bring life to all of us." That's the eternal life Jesus mentioned.
"And so, if we have God's Son, we have this life," promised I John 5:12. A warning then follows: "But if we don't have the Son, we don't have this life." If you're not sure about whether you have it, leave a comment -- we'll be glad to help settle the matter for you.
UPDATED POKER SCOREBOARD: 60 final tables in 152 nights (39.5%) - 11 cashes.
NATIONAL LEAGUE OF POKER TOTAL: Full tournaments - 29 point wins in 193 games (15.0%), 11 final tables, no cashes.
There's a chance we could qualify for NLOP's Sunday night $1000 weekly championship, so we're trying heads-up games there to increase our point count. So far we're one-for-one.
POKER STARS.NET TOTAL: Pretend cash games - $14,803, down $110.
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