The first image that always comes to my mind when I hear the word “poker”, is a group of tough and dirty cowboys gathered around a table in a filthy saloon, guns at their sides, playing hard and sometimes to the death. I have thousands of these images in my mind, some in color, some in black and white, all from the old western movies and TV shows I used to watch with my Dad when I was a kid.
When I was a kid, poker was introduced to me as a tough and dangerous game, played only by the most manly of men. If you were going to play, you had to be willing to put up, and lose, everything. If you were going to cheat, you had to be willing to include your life in the stakes. The cheats and those who didn’t pay their debts were dealt with harshly. The winners won big, got the girl, and got the respect of every man in town. In my mind I wanted to be one of those cowboys just as much as I once wanted to be a fireman, police man, or astronaut.
As I got older, I played the same every-now-and-then home games that everyone plays. Sometimes for pennies, sometimes for more, sometimes for nothing. But I never took poker all too seriously. I never tried to learn anything about it. I never thought anyone could actually make a living at it.
Eventually I stumbled across some of the first World Series Of Poker shows that were aired. I was so naive at the time, that when I saw my first no-limit Hold ‘em tournament on TV, I thought the chips represented real money. I was even more stunned when I first learned the actual dollar amounts these guys were winning for top 10 finishes. I thought the money in the pots was a lot, when I figured out how much the money in the prize pool was, I was simply astounded.
Slowly, as I watched more tournaments on TV, I started to think that I was understanding more and more of the game. I went from saying, “What’s this guy gonna do?”, to saying, “Is this guy gonna do what I think?”, and even sometimes, “Even I know that was stupid, why’d he do that?”. I was interested, I enjoyed following along, but I still had no real desire to learn anything, or play myself. Poker was played only in casinos, it didn’t yet exist online, and if I were to play in a casino, I’d have to risk a lot more money than I was comfortable with, even though I lived just an hour from Atlantic City, NJ. As the game started to pop up on the internet, I still wasn’t that interested, and still assumed I’d need to risk more money than I could afford.
But then one day something happened. I was flipping through the channels, there was nothing on, and I stumbled across a poker tournament, and decided to watch for a few minutes. As the camera moved around the table, there he was, sitting emotionless like a rock, dressed in black, his long hair down his back from under his black cowboy hat, thin slick black sunglasses hiding his eyes, his hands in a fist under his chin. The cowboys were still alive. There sat Chris Ferguson, looking like a modern version of everything I remember from those Sunday morning westerns with my Dad. I thought to myself, “I want to meet that guy. I want to sit at a table and play this game, against that guy.”
I hope to one day to at least meet Chris, just to say thank you for unknowingly inspiring a dream. I’m not sure yet if I’ll ever reach a position that will put me face to face with him at a table, but I’m hoping that if I do, his cowboy image stops short of the gun at his side, because I plan on taking all his chips any way I can.