one...two...three...guts!

"Quarter guts!"

That was probably my favorite call -- or maybe my favorite was "baseball, follow the queen, down." But this post is about guts. Only because I twote to a friend that I'd write a post about it. I didn't tell her that I'd write about baseball follow the queen down. This was, by the way, occasioned by my daughter's newfound interest in poker.

We're pretty much talking about the mid 1980's through the 1990's when my friends and I would get together at least once a week to play poker. Our card games were the kind of thing that would make serious players cringe. We played all sorts of crazy variants, with wild cards, cards that could become wild, or become tame in the middle of a hand. And we were loud and rambunctious. Usually it was in good fun, though I do recall one time when a Super Big Gulp went flying across the room.

We played for low stakes. Generally, a nickel ante. Five cents would buy more then than it does now, but even then it was a low ante. With a small ante like that, I could generally play for hours and end the evening up or down only a few dollars. I figured that, if I lost that was the price for an evening of entertainment. Cheaper than a movie. And if I won, all the better. Guts was the one game that would regularly have a higher ante. In the case of "quarter guts," it was twenty-five cents.

Guts was a simple game. Everyone was dealt three cards. There were no flushes or straights, so three aces was the high hand. We also never had wild cards, though I don't know why. Anyway, we would each look at our own hand, decide whether to stay in and then hold our cards in the air. The dealer would count, "One. Two. Three. Guts!" Those who were staying in would hold onto our cards. Those who were dropping would...drop. Of those who stayed, the high hand won the pot.* Everyone who stayed in and didn't win had to match the pot for the next round. We played round after round until only one person stayed in. That person won the pot and the game ended.

Now, if only one person stayed in in the first round,  the game ended pretty quickly. But if three or more people stayed in, the pot could grow -- a lot. When three people stayed in, the pot would double. When four stayed in, it would triple. Sometimes it would actually top $10, which was huge for our game. And I do recall one time when it actually topped $100. And during the earlier years, when we were still college students, that was big money.**

By the way, Vin, if you're reading this: I apologize for that stretch where, every game, I would use the bathroom, and turn that shelving unit around backwards. And I apologize for denying it was me when you called me out for it.

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*This leaves the question of what to do if the game was tied and the pot was not evenly divisible by the number of winners. I remember the first time I asked what would happen. The dealer picked one of the guys and said "Jon gets the extra nickel." That didn't sit well with me, since it was no longer a fair game, but one that gave Jon an unfair advantage. Yeah, I guess that was kind of petty of me. Anyway, I don't remember how we resolved it that first time -- or the next. I may have sat out a game. Eventually we fell into a standard rule that the extra nickel stays and gets added to the next pot.

**There was one particular guy who had less money than the rest of us. Or so it seemed. Let's call him "Goldman," after Oscar Goldman from The Six Million Dollar Man. Outside of our game, when someone had a nervous decision to make, it would be likened to "Goldman holding a pair of kings in guts with a $25 pot."