“Oh, that’s a pikers’ game,” her husband’ll say. “Ten-cent chips and twenty-cent limit’s the right dope.”
Then Joe Tuttle passes out stacks o’ twenty chips each and the husbands settle.
Next, it’s whether we’ll play straight poker, with a buck, or straight jacks. That’s Mrs. Tuttle’s cue to horn in.
“Let’s do like we usually do,” she says: “Straight poker except when the dealer’s got the buck; then a jackpot.”
“With deuces wild in the jackpots,” says my Missus.
Now I’ve learned by experience that it’s just wastin’ my breath; but I can’t never resist makin’ a speech at this point.
“If poker’s a rotten game,” I tell ’em, “why don’t we play somethin’ else? The guy that built the first deck o’ cards meant for deuces to be the dregs o’ the game. The guy that invented poker kept deuces in their proper place, somethin’ to be laughed at. I claim poker’s the best game o’ cards, without no garnisheements. You don’t see the American League passin’ a rule to make the infielders play blindfolded so’s to improve baseball. The billiard experts never think o’ stickin’ three more object balls on the table so’s it’ll be easier to score. The colleges ain’t never considered supplyin’ the halfbacks with motorcycles to increase their speed. When you put wild cards in a poker game you blow the brains out of it. It’s an insult to the man that got it up. You might as well add the story o’ the two Irishmen to the Declaration of Independence, to make it funny.”
And then we start playin’, with deuces wild in the jackpots.
Once every six or seven weeks I win enough to pay for what the Missus loses. Hatch breaks even once out o’ ten times. The other nine times he quits ahead. Mrs. Hatch, as I told you, loses just the amount we’ve forced