Posted by The All-In-Uit | Filed under Bloggers Corner
In case you’re trying to work out what the punch line is for the above, there isn’t one*. Partly because I’m just not that witty and partly because it’s not meant to be a joke – it’s just a description of me catching up with my brothers.
A lot of people who get into poker do so because they grew up playing cards with their family, “gambling” with pennies or buttons, or whatever inconsequential household items families happen to have a lot of. If we did it in ours, the only logical currency would have to have been plastic take-away containers – being Asian, my mum refused to throw anything away if it was “still good” – I swear we have relics dating back to the early eighties.
But, I didn’t grow up playing cards. Nor did I grow up doing any kind of gambling. Instead I grew up in a Pentecostal church where even though the rules we followed were apparently those of the never-changing-always-and-forever-the-same God, said rules seemed to change all the time. First girls couldn’t wear pants, then we could. We couldn’t dance because it led to sex, then we could dance but only if there was no physical contact and we stood in a circle, then we could dance like normal people, but we were too scared to because any kind of close contact would obviously immediately result in pregnancy and the damnation of our souls to hell for all eternity.
And of course we never gambled. When we went to Asian family functions we would shake our heads at the dads playing blackjack in the the corner and mutter tut-tuts at the mums playing Mahjong around those rickety square tables with the fold-out wooden legs. Amid the yells of “Aiya-la” and the rattling of the plastic tiles being shuffled and stacked, we would sit piously in the corner waiting for our parents to take us away from this den of iniquity.
So we grew up. We eventually became old enough to not have to go to Asian family functions anymore, and instead drove ourselves to church – twice on Sundays for the morning and evening services, Mondays for worship team rehearsal, Tuesdays for leader’s meetings, Wednesdays for small group, Fridays for youth group, and Saturdays for youth group band practice.
My parents encouraged us to do whatever we wanted – and we wanted to serve God. Of course, like any good Asian parents, they made us do “proper” university courses first – my brother and I flaked and got Arts degrees, while my other brother avoided being shunned after dropping out of uni by completing an IT course at a local community college.
At the end of it all, while my parents secretly wished that we would suddenly want to become doctors/lawyers/physiotherapists/engineers (in that order), instead my brother went to Japan to become a missionary, my other brother took up an internship in the church, and I moved interstate and started studying at bible college.
A few years later, my brother is still “saving” those heathen Japanese, my other brother is now a youth pastor, and I’m coming up to the third anniversary of when I sat down at my computer and googled “online poker”.
I was on track to become the next Darlene Zschech (Google is your friend). Instead, I’m in a world of degens, prop bets and an everyday vocabulary littered with terms like “tilt”, “sick tilt”, and “sick monkey tilt”.
Needless to say, it’s all been a little bit complicated. My family have been pretty good about the whole thing, and are sweet enough not to tell me things like, “We’re praying for you,” to my face, but even I’m left wondering how on earth I got here.
After a lifetime of listening to, “Gambling is bad, mmm-kay,” I finally have the chance to define what I believe – and it’s turning out to be more difficult than I could have ever imagined. So I’ll teeter between loving this hobby that has enabled me to see the world and those moments where I’m disillusioned with the world of gambling (shock horror) and I want to run off and become a nun. Over/under on the latter?
*Punchline submissions welcome, please email to pokerfromtherail@fulltiltpoker.com, winner will receive a virtual pat on the back.
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