-
Fill in!
Comes the cry from Vince’s or Ivan’s, fill in! No we didn’t need to fill in any holes, except those around the table. Fill in is the cry to fill your seat around the poker table.
Fall Friday nights were often spent at Ivan’s or Vince’s, playing poker, not the texas hold-em of today, but dealers choice, usually 5 Card Draw. Get a jackpot? Well then someone needed jacks or better to open the next hand. We also occasionally played some blackjack or blind indian, high or low chicago, and I forget what else.
The biggest difference in our games was though the gizmo. The gizmo was an innocuous film canister. Well, its what held it anyway. The gizmo takes some explaining; the first hand of the night was the gizmo hand. All players put a loonie in the pot and we played as normal, with the winner winning the gizmo, and its value being the contributed loonies. Here’s where it gets interesting, when it was the winners turn to ante, he anted the gizmo, basically a free ante. but if anyone else wanted to play that hand, they had to ante its value. So we could automatically have a large pot on the board before we really started. Tradition then said the winner added another loonie to its value so as the night went on, it got more and more valuable.
Of course with increased value, often no one played the hand at all, but sometimes…. well holy cow!
Of course there were other memories of poker night too, like the night Ivan’s brdige collapsed, or Dale Butt calling for Tracey and Eric saying “Terra Nova fisheries, Connor speaking”. To be followed by two more “Duffet’s Building Supplies, Carpenter Speaking”, and finally “House of the Lord, Jesus speaking” before he caught on he wasn’t getting wrong numbers.
Memories of me and Howard raising each other over and over, him with a pair of 3s and me with a pair of deuces. And Chris Haynes laughing his head off cause he had thrown away three nines. Memories of being “notched”, of Vince feeding the rabbit, of Vince opening a jackpot and then throwing away his openers and taking 5 and still beating Jim Bailey and memories of watching the OJ Simpson chase on Ivan’s small black and white tv.
Raised in outport Newfoundland in a town of 65 people, I pursued a post secondary diploma in Information Technology right out of High School.
I’ve always been a geek at heart, but yet I love the rural life I grew up with. Fishing, hunting, camping and the great outdoors are still loves of mine, even if I don’t pursue them as often as I once did. Sports were always a big part of our lives, and I played many (badly) and loved them all.
The Fair Traipsin over the Goowhitty
3 thoughts on “Fill in!”
Leave a Reply
Cans and Tins, Oh My!Saw someone post on Facebook “What do you call these?” in relation to Pepsi, Coke etc. Of course what they were looking for was Soda, Pop, Soft Drink, etc. But someone (Jim Pottle) had replied “Cans” – and that brought to mind that we actually never used to call them cans …
Toy Time Around ClarenvilleGrowing up back home in eastern Newfoundland, There were no huge malls or big box stores, instead we had locally owned stores. The names will ring bells for some, Western Tire, Stanley’s, Duffit’s, Junes, and a bit later The Chain Store, Ayres, but the granddaddy of them all for me was Cholock’s. …- If you’re not gonna share…In 1973, the “New” school on Random Island opened. Originally called Random Island Integrated, its now called Random Island Academy. In Grade 11, I was part of the drama club that put off a, in pretty much everyones opinion, great play called Riverrun, semi based on a book of the …
All good 🙂
Oh, funny, I have friends named Vince and Ivan. No they are different ones but NL is a small place!
[…] early 90’s I think it was, one of our regular clan, and one of the hosts of our semi-regular poker games, Ivan Patey, went away to the mainland for work. He’d been gone a while, and none of […]