Poker Night 189: Short Trips

"Trip" is poker slang for three of a kind. Tonight at The Red Barn, trips appeared on the board several times at our opening table. A man across from us insisted we dealt them all. We only recalled dealing this one....

BLINDS: 25/50

IN THE POCKET: K-10 of hearts

It's early, and one or two players have been aggressively betting before the flop. But no one does here, and we call. Two other players jump in.

ON THE FLOP: 7-2-7 (suits won't matter)

We call flops like this a "Boeing flop." As in the airplane, you know. :-) But anyway, everyone checks -- and so do we.

ON THE TURN: 7

"There are those trips again," we remember saying. (Only as we write this do we remember dealing three Kings by the turn earlier.) No one's bailing out of the plane; everyone checks again.

ON THE RIVER: K

If no one else hit the board, we just did! The two players ahead of us check. We bet 800, hoping to entice callers. A man to our left does.

"Do you have a King?" we ask. He doesn't. We do. A nice full house gains us about 2,500 chips.

But we missed some draws later -- and once we survived to the final table, we folded back-to-back hands which would have given us trips on the flop. Finally forced to go all-in in the small blind, our desperation 5-10 fell short. We finished in a three-way tie for sixth place (eighth in points), due to a triple take-out.

MINISTRY MOMENT: "I know several of those guys," a man said as he reviewed our "Jesus as your Savior" coin tonight. It was a gift from someone in a Christian motorcycle club several years ago -- and the man analyzing it belongs to a different biker club.

"Do you agree with that message? Is Jesus your Savior?"

"No, He's not," the man answered after a moment.

"Is there a reason why not?"

The man gave this question a lot of thought. A noisy room made his answer difficult to hear, but it involved not accepting the idea of "predestination."

"Not all Christians agree with that," we said. "There's the predestination side, and the free will side. It's a big religious dividing point."

The biker then explained he tends to live his life without religion, by "playing the cards as they're dealt." That admittedly caused us to have a lot of thought. How would you answer this? We'll compare notes in an upcoming post.

UPDATED POKER SCOREBOARD: 80 final tables in 189 nights (42.3%) - 15 cashes. With this third final table in a row, we clinch a goal of making 40 percent for 200 games.