Playing Poker

One Friday evening each month, a group of eight of us gather at someone’s house for an evening playing poker. We’ve been doing this for longer than I can remember, at least 20 years or so. We’re all all about the same age and we play poor man’s poker where the most you can lose is $5.00.

We take turns hosting the monthly game and everyone else brings snacks to share. It’s a good opportunity for us to socialize during breaks and share experiences, both good and bad. My guess is that there are thousands of similar poker groups across the country.

The poker group has been a dramatic device in movies, TV shows and even commercials.

It has a long-running presence in the stage, movie and TV versions of “The Odd Couple.” And Kenny Rogers singing his hit “You’ve Got to Know When to Hold ‘Em” is the basis of a GEiCO insurance commercial. Rogers’s poker mates react with disgust and anger when he sings the song for the umpteenth time during their game.

The poker game was a staple of the movie and TV Westerns that my Baby Boom generation grew up watching. There was drama in the high stakes of these games usually at the town saloon and there was usually violence if one of the players was caught cheating.

An American Game

Poker appears to be a uniquely American game originating early in the 19^th century. In 1829 English actor Joseph Crowell wrote about a card game played in New Orleans involving four players and 20 cards with the highest hand winning a pot each round. At this time, riverboats were taking passengers up and down the Mississippi River and gambling, including poker, was a popular pastime among the passengers.

Sometime before the Civil War, the so-called French deck of 52 cards was introduced to poker. At this time different forms of poker, straight, stud and community card poker games were introduced and gained popularity. During the Civil War, there were press accounts and drawings of soldiers playing poker in camps. A couple of my poker group friends often talk of playing the game while they were in the military during the Vietnam War.

Poker went mainstream during the 1970s when the World Series of Poker and other tournaments were held all across the country. This popularity lead to a number of poker books being published in the 1980s and the beginnings of online poker as the Internet began to take hold. In the 1990s TV series “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” there were poker-game scenes in 10 of the episodes.

Poker Goes Cyber

Advancements in video technology led to a series of poker-based TV shows as we entered the new Millennium. The use of smaller cameras allowed the audience to see the cards and expressions of players more clearly.

At the 2003 WSOP, an accountant with no poker experience named Chris Moneymaker (no joke!), paid $40 and entered the novice round of the tournament. Apparently he picked up the game pretty quickly and advanced to the championship round where he won the first prize of $2.5 million!

The International Federation of Poker was established in 2009, in Lausanne, Switzerland, to govern the game as its international popularity exploded.

Online Poker and the Feds

Back in the U.S., the increasing popularity of online poker led FBI to investigate online gambling and question its legality. “You can go to Vegas. You can go to Atlantic City. You can go to the racetrack. You can go to any of these places and gamble legally, “ said Leslie Bryant, head of the FBI’s Cyber Crime Unit. “But, don’t do it online. It’s against the law.”

In 2011, the U.S. Department of Justice obtained indictments against three of the largest online gambling sites and charged them with wire fraud, bank fraud, money laundering and a variety of other charges. The defendants maintained their innocence saying they were based offshore and violated no US laws.

On Christmas Eve 2011, Assistant U.S. Attorney General Virginia Seitz ruled that the Wire Act of 1961, used by the DOJ for the indictments, only prohibited betting on sports or sporting events. Earlier, courts had ruled the Wire Act of 1961 governed the Internet.

Seitz responded to a request by the states of New York and Illinois to permit online betting for their state lotteries. “We conclude that the Cyber Crime Unit’s premise is incorrect and that the Wire Act prohibits only transmission of communication related to bets or wagers on sporting events or contests.”

So, today, you can watch poker on Cable and Satellite networks where players bet hundreds of thousands on a regular basis. You also can play online 24/7 and wager as much as the game permits.

I still prefer to play in person, where you can try to guess who’s bluffing and who isn’t. And I enjoy the comraderie of playing with friends I have known for a long time—even though they win more than I do most of the time.

Going to Your Reunion?

I’ve been thinking a lot about reunions—specifically high school reunions—because I’ve recently received a couple of mailings about my 50-year reunion to be held later this summer. I’ve heard from fellow classmates I haven’t seen or heard from in, well, 50 years.

I’m somewhat uncertain about this approaching reunion, but I am looking forward to seeing my classmates and curious about how they turned out.

I looked at numerous articles, columns and blogs about attending high school reunions and most of the authors had a negative point of view. Some of the authors had a lot of angst before about whether to attend or not. Ken Levine, a writer/producer/director who has worked on numerous TV shows and has done play-by-play of major league baseball asked: “How much do you want to see these people again?”

My Reunions

I did go to my 20-year reunion and actually had a pretty good time. Some people had changed a lot and others not so much. It was a fun, interesting evening, but I have not attended any other reunions of my high school class since, so I have seen only a few of my classmates in the last 30 years.

A few years ago I did attend the 50-year reunion of my eighth-grade class and it was a wonderful evening—better than I expected. Amazingly, more than half of the class attended even though nine members of our class of 58 students had passed away. Because we were 8^th graders the last time we had met, some of the less desirable things about high school were absent—although by the end of the evening most of us were congregated in the same cliques as 50 years before.

My 8th Grade Class-St. Catherine's School in 1962

St. Catherine's Class of '62 in 2012

Social Media and Reunions

One thing that has changed the dynamic of high school reunions is Facebook. There is disagreement whether this was a positive or negative among the sources I looked at. Some writers thought Facebook was great because it helped reunion organizers get in touch with classmates about reunion details. It also provides a preview of the reunion because you can see what some of your classmates look like before the event.

But, others say this lessens curiosity as a reason to attend. One writer even suggested this as a possible reason that there is less interest in reunions now and that causes attendance to suffer. That’s an interesting argument, but I’m not sure if interest and attendance at class reunions is declining.

A Member of the First Class

Another factor in my experience is that I didn’t know a lot of my high school classmates very well. I attended a Catholic high school in a suburb of Dayton, Ohio, and our students came from a fairly spread out area. So, before I was old enough to drive, most of my social contacts in my neighborhood went to the public high school near where I lived.

Also, my family moved to the Dayton area during the summer before my freshman year, so I hadn’t gone to grade school with any of my high school classmates. The first day of my freshman year, I walked into that school and knew absolutely no one.

The most unique fact about my high school class is we were the first class to graduate from that school. We began as the only class as freshman and a class was added below us each year until the school was at capacity our senior year. So, I never had any upperclassmen in high school and that was mostly a positive.

But, there was no established tradition and there were very few activities the first couple of years. For example, I liked music and dabbled in guitar and piano, but there was no band program although I did sing in the glee club and really enjoyed that.

The Pros and Cons of Reunions

Several sources indicate that somewhere between 20 and 30-percent of a high school class will attend a reunion and a 30-percent turnout is considered excellent. The most popular reunion for attendance is the 50^th, followed by the 10^th and 25^th reunions. The most popular months to hold a class reunion are July and August, followed by June and September.

The bad news is that by the 50^th reunion of a high school class, on average about 20 percent will have passed away.

When deciding whether to attend a reunion, whether 50-year, 20-year or whatever, there are pros and cons to consider. The biggest pro is to satisfy curiosity. You’ll get an answer to the question, “Whatever happened to…?” for many of your classmates, even some who don’t attend. What could be either a pro or a con is if your “old flame” attends the reunion—something that could go in almost any direction and has been a popular storyline for numerous movies and TV shows.

Another possible con is how well or poorly the years have treated you and your classmates. In a New York Times column, former TV talk show host and comic Dick Cavett observed after his 50^th reunion that: “The strangest part of the aging factor is that, as with suffering, people don’t experience it equally.” You may be concerned about your appearance or will be shocked and saddened by the appearance of some of your classmates.

A few months after my 50-year 8^th grade reunion, one of my classmates was moved to tears when the star football player in our class arrived at a St. Patrick’s day party in a bar using a walker. She said how sad it was to see someone who was so strong and athletic as a young man in that condition. Yes, it was sad, but a year later at the same gathering he had recovered a lot, walking on his own and looking much better, for someone our age.

So, if you go to your reunion, just remind yourself that most everyone there has the same feelings as you. If you are cynical, remind yourself that it will only last a few hours and then you will never see most of your classmates again. On the other hand, especially with social media, email and unlimited long-distance phones, you might be able to rekindle a long-dormant friendship. But, the only way to do that is to go. So, enjoy.

Hoarders: Too Much Stuff for Their Place

You’ve probably seen a photo similar to the one shown below on your local TV news or in your local newspaper. The usual scenario is EMT personnel or police discover a condition like this where they have entered a house because of a crime or medical emergency. The resident is usually older, perhaps suffering from dementia or other health problems, and we cringe when we see pictures of a house or apartment so full of stuff, that the only way to get around is by using narrow gaps between piles of stuff.

Courtesy: stuff.no.nz

Emergency personnel often call these homes “path houses.”

Most of us would never imagine letting things get this bad and we do manage to control the proliferation of stuff in our houses. But, like Gresham’s Law posits that nature abhors a vacuum, our houses eventually fill up with stuff. And then, as the comic George Carlin once noted in his monologue “A Place for your Stuff,” we move to a bigger house so we can get more stuff.

And one of the more unique cable TV reality shows is the Arts & Entertainment network’s “Hoarders” now in its seventh season. Each hour-long episode follows two hoarders as a team of professionals attempt to help them deal with their hoarding problem. And hoarding is not a trivial matter—hoarders can suffer health, social, psychological, financial and even legal problems if the situation gets too bad. It can cause families to break up, illness for the hoarder, and hoarders can even face eviction for violating local housing health and safety codes. If a home is deemed uninhabitable by local officials, the hoarder may lose custody of any children living there.

Hoarders are often discovered in the aftermath of a natural disaster, fire or illness of the resident. That’s when emergency responders will notice and report conditions of a hoarder’s house while trying to rescue a resident. In the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy in 2012, officials discovered hundreds of hoarders among the thousands of homes damaged by that storm.

The Mayo Clinic defines hoarding disorder as “persistent difficulty discarding or parting with possessions because of the perceived need to save them.” The hoarder experiences distress at the thought of disposing of items and eventually accumulates too much stuff regardless of the actual value of the items being kept.

Favored items for hoarders to keep include newspapers, magazines, papers, plastic bags, photos, household supplies, food and clothing. A hoarding condition also can lead to compulsive purchases of more and more stuff and that could lead to financial difficulties.

Experts say there is a link between hoarding and Obsessive Compulsive Disorders (OCD) and there may even be a genetic tendency to hoard. The main symptoms of hoarding are: inability to dispose of stuff, difficulty organizing or categorizing possessions, anxiety about disposing of stuff, feeling overwhelmed or embarrassed about where to put things and suspicion of letting others into the house to know about their possessions.

Hoarders often have other behavioral and psychological problems such as ADHD or depression. Some hoarders live in home where appliances are broken, the furnace doesn’t work or other necessary items go unrepaired. The hoarder decides to cope with the inconvenience rather than let a repairman come into the home.

How many people have this condition? The website Psychcentral.com says the number is between 700,000 to 1.4 million. Among those with OCD, experts estimate 18 to 42 percent of them are hoarders.  The International OCD Foundation estimates that 2 percent of the population hoards.  Psychologist Gregory Jantz, founder of “The Center-a Place for Hope” and author of more than two dozen books says that hoarding is unique because it both causes stress and relieves anxiety.

New York City has set up a specific department to deal with hoarders who have been discovered. The city will provide counseling, help in disposal of the junk and provide referrals to social service agencies that can aid in the “recovery” of the hoarder.

With the increased number of aging Baby Boomers, this is a good idea for other communities to emulate because the number of hoarders is likely to increase.