Thursday, August 03, 2006
Final days in Vancouver - Golf, Fireworks, and Chinese Poker
Last night we went to this thing called "The Celebration of Light" put on by Vancouver where one of four teams (Czech Republic, Mexico, China, and Italy) put on a 25 minute fireworks show set to music on one of four nights. We saw the Czech one last night and it was okay, but I have a feeling it wasn't the best one. Today Myia, her brother Myles, and me played golf at Fraserview. I obviously took pictures of both things totaling 39. Check them out on my webshots website by clicking -->here<--.
On a side note I have Myia addicted to a form of poker called Chinese poker. We play whenever we need to kill time as it always flies when you are playing this game. If you want to learn the basic rules click here. Its a two-four player game that I promise you will love if want a break from hold'em. When Myia and I play we use a 2-4 scoring system where if you win 2 out of 3 hands you get 1 point plus a bonus point for winning more hands. Similarly if you sweep a player you get 3 points plus one for winning more hands, and we play with all royalties 4 of a kind+ and naturals. All the pros play it when they want to goof off or kill time for as much as $1,000 a point. When I was in Vegas I saw Tim Phan, Johhny Chan, Minh Nguyen, etc. playing at the Rio. I learned from watching them that when they play heads up Chinese they each get 2 seperate sets of 13 cards and play each set against their opponents other 2 sets of hands, so that's what Myia and I have been doing since we got back. It makes the swings way bigger as you can lose 8 points easy in a deal, which is the way it should be when you play 4 players. When we play heads-up we always used to play one set each, and thus had been playing too small and after seeing the difference we now always play two sets of hands each.
We played for about 3 hours while waiting for the fireworks to start and I finished up 16 points :-). After you learn basic Chinese Poker where you make two five card stud hands and a three card hand all as good as possible you HAVE to learn a second version of the game. This will only make sense if you know who to play regular Chinese, but if you do, you have to try playing Chinese with 2-7 in the middle. This means you make a strong hand in the back which has to be stronger then your 3 card hand, but in the middle you make as bad a hand as possible. The worst hand would obviously be 2 3 4 5 7 with no flush as aces are considered high. So if you have been playing regular Chinese with your friends give this variation a try as it brings new life to the game. HINT: Try to make your best 2-7 first, see what you have left, and work from there taking away from your 2-7 cards only when you have to.
Layne Flack also did a Carplyer interview/tutorial about Chinese which you can watch by clicking -->here<--
