I am not exactly what you would call a card whiz. My experience consists mostly of five card draw with my high school buddies and spades and euchre with friends and girlfriends since. My family is not one of those card-playing families, with, you know, holiday tournaments that go all night long. We make puzzles and we play board games. When I was a kid it was Risk and Monopoly (I was always the horse or dog). Too bad they didn't have cats. Big ones! And in Risk, I won't give away all my strategy, but Australia is a good place to start. Risk went a long way in fanning my interest in geography. These days, it's nearly impossible to find anyone who wants to play, however! The game has been collecting dust on my shelf for years.
Nevertheless, I consider myself a decent technical card player. Once, in preparation for a weekend in Las Vegas, I bought and read an entire book about blackjack. I learned about soft seventeens, insurance, doubling down, splitting, when to stand and when to hit. I played everything by the book and won $900 my first night there. The dealer said she couldn't believe this was my first time, though she may have just been looking for bigger tips (it worked! Flattery goes a long ways with me, unfortunately). Of course, I proceeded to lose nearly all of it over the course of the weekend, but at least it paid for a show or two.
So with this uninspiring background, I found myself playing euchre at a friend's house one night not long ago. There were mostly strangers there. I don't know many people. Whenever I'm invited anyplace this makes for perpetual getting-to-know-you discomfort. With Brandon as my partner, though, and with a couple of Captain Morgan's running through my veins (which always makes me think I'm a mathematical genius), I felt pretty confident that we would take on all comers. So much so, that I was willing to put my money on the line.
So, Brandon and I had already vanquished 2 other teams over the last couple of hours and we needed more victims. One guy, Bernie, who I didn't know, was game. We needed just one more. In the meantime, there was one young woman, standing off to the side in the kitchen, who kept distracting me. First, she's over there trying to use a corkscrew to open a twist-off bottle of wine. Then, having given up on that task, she decided to make an attempt at blending daiquiris. There were two problems with this. One, she was trying to coordinate said blending while swaying her hips and turning in circles to some Shania Twain song about feeling like a woman or something. She also wore her glasses halfway down her nose, so that whenever the blender started going, they would slide down to the end and she would have to stop what she was doing to push them back up. She was very cute, I must admit, but this was a recipe for disaster. between the hip-swaying and slippery glasses, she apparently did not notice that she had not properly tightened the lid on the blender. The problem was exacerbated by her overconfidence that she could now adjust her glasses without turning off the machine. So, yeah, you guessed it. Down went the glasses, up went her hand, and kaplooey! went the daiquiris. She shyly turned our way and smiled, strawberries and ice dripping from her nose, and said sheepishly, "Oh, dear."
Brandon, of course, asked her, "We need a fourth. Do you want in?"
"Um, I don't know. I don't know much about cards.
"That's alright. What have you played?
"Uno, Go Fish, and Spoons."
"Spoons?"
"Don't ask."
"Nah, come on," Brandon replied, "we'll teach you how to play euchre." He turned to her soon-to-be partner and said, "what do you think Bernie?
"Yeah, sure, of course. What's your name?"
"Sara."
The game started off interesting enough. After a few practice hands, the dealer (me) got screwed and had to pick a trump suit that I couldn't win with. On the next hand, Sara got dealt both bowers and pushed her team over the top. She shrugged. "Did I just do something good?" No problem. Beginner's luck. And indeed, things got better after that. Brandon and I started rolling. We euchred them twice, and Brandon went alone and swept the deck on one hand. We were closing in on yet another victory.
But then a funny thing happened. Sara called to go it alone. She bled out the rest of our trump card and saved the right bower for the end. She played it perfectly! That was a pretty sophisticated move for a beginner. "Oh my! That was okay, right?" When she played two more perfect hands, Brandon and I looked at each other in disbelief, or smug confidence suddenly turning sour. Thirty minutes later, I turned my pockets inside out and found that they were empty. Sara was striding for the door, money in hand. She set the last of her daiquiris down, opened the door, and as she left, she turned her head over her left shoulder, smiled, and walked out with nothing more than a simple "ta ta, boys!" Broke as I was, I couldn't help but think that I've got to find this girl again!
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