Gong Xi Fa Cai (gimme all yer money)

My littlest brother is obsessed with his iPod touch. He's also obsessed with his Nintendo Wii, the best of YouTube, photo tagging on Facebook, and Texas Hold 'Em Poker.

How the hell did Texas Hold'Em become so gawdamn popular? It's been taking over KL for at least a solid year now, and its really picking up steam this Chinese New Year.

I had resisted for a long time, just like I try to resist so many things that have a strong popular groundswell to them. I guess sometimes I like to think that I'm cooler than everyone else; so if 10 people are taking part in something, then they must be the masses and and stupid, and because I don't partake in the masses, then I am cool and special and unique.

WRONG

Hold' Em is frikkin awesome. In fact, I'm only writing this blog between hands on a 90 player Sit n' Go tournament on Full Tilt poker (download the app from http://www.fulltilt.com)

*********15 minutes later***********

OK, I lost.

FUCK.

Now I'm pissed off because I'm trying to teach myself patient poker playing, to stop giving in to the tantazlingly big pots that may come up. Then I didn't want to blog because I'm all pissed off, but then I remembered that I'm blogging as a writing exercise, so that I can get use to WRITING again... rather than the normal sell-cigarettes-to-your-children work that I do. SO I'm going to continue blogging for tonight. Where was I? Oh yeah. So now I'm addicted to poker, which is brilliant, considering I'm quitting smoking, cutting down on drinking and womanizing... nothing like a little gambling to fill up all my free time.

I picked up the gambling bug sometime in 2008 when my Roti Canai Crazy Cousins from New York came to visit and on a whim we decided to show them Genting. Hercules and myself had never been to the casino before and figured that this would be a great time to ch-ch-ch-check it out... so upward ho to Ringding (which is what Roti Canai Crazy Cousin #2 kept calling it because he's soooooo American).

I was my normal frugal self and decided to only play RM100, and picked roulette because hey, how hard could it be to pick RED or BLACK? We kept going like this on the RM5 bet tables until I was down to my last chip and said ohhhwadahell, i'll just pick a number and lets see what 'eppens.

1 Red, straight up.

I hit, and the payout was 35:1. for a RM5 bet, i made RM175.

SO MANY CHIPS!

WAHHHHHHH! I knew something was wrong, instantly. Something had clicked inside my head. An employee of my Brain had just checked the box next to "GAMBLING" on the clipboard of my life. I was hooked.

I gave Hercules some chips and then ka-ching, HE hit. It was ON like the Kong of Donkeys. My RCCCousins were done playing and were getting bored, but my bro and I sat there like proper losers and kept going and going and going. I ended up winning around RM1000 off of my initial RM100 investment, and Hercules did even better. Beginner's luck is a bitch though, because not more than TWO WEEKS LATER, we were feeling rich and itchy again so we took a late night trip up to the Highlands at 11pm with a car full of dudes and found ourselves at the casino. That was a pretty bad night. My first RM100 was gone in less than 10 minutes. Not long after, I was down RM200... and then RM500.

WHY DO THEY HAVE ATMS IN CASINOS!!!!????

Which was a really bad idea, because it was a tight month in the first place. I was interested in winning a free car payment for the month since i didn't really have money for much else, and there I was RM500 in the hole. No free car payment, but further compounded by No utilities, No cable bill, and No phone bill for the month.

Hercules was freaking out. The carload of friends were being irritating and saying we should head back. It was about 3am. It felt disgusting. It felt really irresponsible, slightly illegal, and I felt like my parents would ground me. The only solution was to win it back with the last RM20 I had in my fanny pack.

Maybe it was the fanny pack? Maybe the Gods of Gambling and the Ghouls of Genting were getting back at me for being so arrogant as to bring a fanny pack to the casino, in hopes of putting all my winnings in there, like some kind of old Taiwanese woman.

As an aside, did you know that Genting has a reputation for being one of the most haunted places in the country? Apparently from the slew of troubled souls who have hurled themselves off the side of the mountain from crippling gambling debts. The casino is said to be FULL of ghosts, heck the whole damn resort is said to be haunted beyond belief. They say that the regular gamblers always carry sweets in their pockets for the ghouls hiding under the tables. Keeps them from munching on your chips.

ANYWAY, I ditched my brother and the friends, turned off my phone, and found a table in the corner of the room and sat down and bet VERY carefully, and slowly but slowly but never surely but definitely slowly won my money back, and finally left Genting at 5am with my winnings for the evening...

RM30.

Which was less than what it cost me to drive up there in the first bloody place, but at least I was 30 up and not 500 down... and I had my dignity. Which is a lie. Coz I lost my dignity too.

We haven't been back since, but that initial joy of winning lots of money was what turned me on to even being receptive to listening to my 12 year old brother explaining to me how Hold 'em Poker works. A few weeks later we hosted a poker night for the cousins, a small RM25 buy in at 50sen a chip. I think I lost RM75, but I was definitely hooked. A few months later, I've now played poker for 4 nights in a row, thanks to this glorious holiday called Chinese New Year.

God Bless the Chinese for their love of pork, their beautiful women, and their unabashed worship of prosperity and money. Chinese people LOVE their gambling, so there has been a lot of poker invitations floating around recently. I'm proud to say that I'm up so far. Not much, I've won about RM200 in the last coupla days, but it's still better than being in the red. Today alone I played two different sessions with two different groups of people.

Tomorrow will be a big night. Heading down to Klang, the Den of Lions, for a kick-ass game with one of the producers from work at his family's open house. That will be some proper Chinese New Year kungfu shit going down. His family, who are from Klang, are making some homemade bak kut teh, followed by some gambling.

Yes.
Yes.
YES.

pork and poker.

like whisky and ice.

yummy.

I don't like the structure of this post. I feel like I'm rambling... but at least I blogged, and my fingers got a work out.

Happy Chinese New Year of the Ox. Let's hope everything works out this year. Obama's in power, the world is on tenterhooks, and the summer of my discontent is proving to be most humid and sweaty.

peace