All Comments on 'Poker Player'

Your superb writing is a breath of fresh air. It's always a treat to read your work.

but catchers do and can, TK U MLJ LV NV

This was typical Ashon - he's submitted the same story, more or less, more than 500 times, and they are always fun. This one, though, has real problems, to wit:

Australians shouldn't write about poker, Ashon doesn't play it, I'd guess. He offers no explanation how cheating such as this could happen in a five player, one deck game.

The dealer can stack a deck - we don't know who was dealing - but .... this couldn't be done. A plausible cheat - dealing a second or an ace off the bottom - that's different, but only the dealer can do that.

The other problem - and maybe I missed the explanation though I read the story twice more after the first time - what are the other players doing while our narrator has his evil way? The group is playing, I'd guess, pot limit - table stakes, and our narrator has cleaned out Jessie. That eliminates her from the game - how about the other guys? No suggestion they had gone all in against her

Two consecutive paragraphs tell what happened to the others. Barry (Jessie's dad) had lost, wants Jessie to quit. Narrator says he will take Jessie home. The next paragraph he leaves, then Mike goes out, obviously sees Jessie cheat, gets the wave off from narrator and then leaves. The next paragraph, the other two guys fall and depart, leaving just narrator and Jessie.

Typical Ashon story. Change the names, change the build up, read the first 5-6 paragraphs and you can skip the rest because once the spanking starts, you have read the same thing over and over again.