Danny ChaiI just found out that Billy Graham has been a registered Democrat for the majority of his voting life. That is fascinating to me. I also came across this quotation from him in 1979, when he refused to join the Moral Majority: “I’m for morality, but morality goes beyond sex to human freedom and social justice. We as clergy know so very little to speak with authority on the Panama Canal or superiority of armaments. Evangelists cannot be closely identified with any particular party or person. We have to stand in the middle in order to preach to all people, right and left. I haven’t been faithful to my own advice in the past. I will be in the future.”
Amen.
On a random note, so all the SoCal KCPC peeps “pre”-burn cards when they play poker. That is, after they’ve dealt the cards, they immediately burn the top of the deck into the discard pile. I don’t get this at all. The entire point of burning cards is to mitigate against marked cards – by burning the card that’s on top of the deck, even if the cards are marked, a person can’t know what’s coming next. Granted, that’s generally not an issue in a friendly home game. But in that case, there’s no point in burning a card at all. If you’re in that much of a hurry, just don’t burn anything. If you’re going to do the burn thing, use it for its intended purpose.
Why it matters: good poker dealing makes clear everything that is going on. Again, less of an issue in friendly home games, but even in home games, I’ve seen issues. Like when there’s a big pot at stake, and someone loses, when you pre-burn, there can be controversy as to whether a card was burned or not. And it’s hard to tell – you have to just trust the dealer. When you burn the card immediately before dealing, everyone sees it, and there’s far less controversy. So either burn right before dealing or just don’t burn at all, so there’s no controversy.
That philosophy guides my poker dealing: it should always be as clear as possible what is happening. That’s also why I’m against taking change from the pot. It makes things unclear and forces you to trust the person doing it. It’s not that people are lying, it’s that everyone occasionally makes math mistakes, so again, it can get controversial, and in the worst case, can spur fights. So I tend to remove bets from previous rounds and discarded cards from in front of the player. That way, it’s immediately obvious what’s going on: players are still in if and only if they have cards in front of them, and you can immediately tell what’s going on in the current round of betting by the chips in front of each player. Taking change confuses the heck out of people.
Not everyone shares my poker dealing philosophy. But they should.
I played twice this weekend, first time in months, and it was pretty fun. Used different styles each night, made it interesting. I think what I like about poker is that it’s dynamic, constantly changing, so you never stop learning. We’ve been playing a lot of bughouse at work and I think I like it for the same reason – different teams bring different styles, and everyone is adapting so it’s never the same. Makes things fun.