Egg In Your Beer

Deer hunters blunderbuss their way through the woods these days bagging an occasional stag, a whiskey flask, and if lucky, a good-natured game warden. But now that athletics have moved indoors, the green felt of the amateur croupier slowly substitutes for the paler verdure of the gridiron, and cards again become the preoccupation of informal undergraduate sports.

Traditional paternal advice to the youth about to embark on a collegiate career include two subjects, and one of these is invariably gambling. On their relative complexity, Lord Chesterfield wrote to his son in an unpublished gem: "The diversion of the chase is considerably easier to master, my boy, than the intricacies of chance."

Next to blondes, gentlemen prefer poker. Blackjack, learnedly classified as "vingt-et-un," is a low born associate of spinning ivories on khaki blankets, and is favored only by those majoring in R.O.T.C. The advent of General Education has definitely entrenched the five card classic, with numerous aberrations localized somewhat to the bank of the Charles.

Robert Benchley '12 was proud of his Harvard background where after four years of intensive study he discovered why one should never draw to an inside straight even in a friendly game. In those ancient days poker was an easy game to master before the invention of the forward pass and the ruffle-shuffle.

Most interesting localism modifying the game that Wild Bill Hickok died over is politely translated from the colloquial as "Upset the adjacent player's plans." Seven cards are distributed to the participants, and they pass around three, pick up another three, and discard two. One expert abandoned this delightful game when he found the others passing his money roll around.

More reckless spirits favor a type of poker known as "the fiery cross." No hand here comes cheaper than a flush, which generally gets flushed where it belongs. With practically every card in the deck wild, so are the players, who also profess proficiency in the double cut and the under-arm shift.

When despair and bouncing checks begin to plague the card-fancier, he often takes deluded refuge in a poker game called "barber's itch." Here two people split the pot, and the rest split blue chips into red chips and red chips into bits of grimy paper.