Your house, your rules

Dear Mark,
I am having a minor dispute with a friend about 'Jack's or better' five card draw.
Is there usually (obviously house rules vary from place to place, but in general) a requirement to prove you have a pair of jacks or better to open? When I learned this game, there was no such requirement and you could actually bluff the open. My friend now tells me that this is not the case and penalties like matching the pot are usually imposed if the opener does bluff. What is your experience on this issue? John K. Internet

When I was growing up, John, if I misplayed a hand in Pinochle, fraudulently or not, the chastening was not only getting the heave-ho from the game but castigated for piss-poor play and an additional penalty of washing all the dishes. This is how I learned that honesty prevails in card play. But I'm writing about a friendly, or in my case, a hostile game environment at the kitchen table where local rules apply.
In casino poker rooms, they don't offer a Jack's or better game for one simple reason. SHOW ME THE MONEY! Casinos can't pay the lighting bills on the many dead hands that a Jack's or better game would create. You can't 'rake' a pot that isn't there. The rake, the money that the card room charges, is usually a percentage or flat fee taken from the pot after each round of betting. Every time a dealer pitches out a hand, your miserly casino owner wants a piece of the action.
As for home rules, I've heard of everything from matching the pot to forfeiting the hand, and in a worse case senerio, the bucking up for all the booze and burgers.
So in the future, John, let whoever is gracious enough to let you spill beer and chip dip all over their carpet make the rules of the house.

Dear Mark,
In years past, Atlantic City casinos use to invited my play with not only a free bus ride to the Shore but a bucket worth of coins to get me started. Seems lately the casinos are getting tighter and tighter with their customers. Are they? Marty S. NY, NY

Yes, Marty, what you perceive is correct my friend. Those rolls of nickels to induce initial play are evaporating as the amount of money the casinos give bus customers spirals downward. Today, AC casinos pay an average of $16.54 to customers bussed in from outer markets, down from the low $20s last year.
It could be worse, Marty. When you have the only game in town like Casino Windsor in Canada, duping $40 out of patrons for valet parking seems appropiate to casino management. Or how about a sole riverboat casino that monopolizes a market? You not only get squat but charged to grace their gambling joint.
So granted, Marty, though you're $4 lighter in the bucket, you still have to love a casino that pays you to play.

Deal Me In: A short poetical ditty I found in my gambling library.

A Lottery is for Taxation
On all the Fools in Creation
And Heaven be prais'd
It's easily rais'd
Credulity's always in Fashion.
For Folly's a Fund
Will never lose Ground
While Fools are so rife in the Nation.

Performed at the Drury Lane Theatre in 1732 by Henry Fielding in his play, "The Lottery."

Got a question about gambling? Write to: Deal Me In, 774 Mays Blvd. Suite 10, Incline Village, NV 89451 or e-mail:winners@winner.com · To order Mark Pilarski's "Hooked on Winning" audio cassettes--laminated win cards package ($12.95 plus $2. S&H) call (800) WINNERS.


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