After Rothenburg, I crashed and fell asleep on the drive back to Wurzburg. But we didn’t have all that much downtime, as we were supposed to meet a couple of his friends at the Standard for poker. Apparently Wednesday night is poker night in the U Wurzburg Physics department. H invited us to join them last night at the beer hall, which we of course accepted. Texas hold’em style, 5 euro buy in, tournament with the top two splitting the pot. Sure, why not? A little poker never hurt anyone. 🙂 MH was more amused at the potential for trash talking between some of his collegues and I – apparently there was a high potential for his amusement.
Heading to the Standard bar, we meet up with H from last night, J and his wife C, and F, the postdoc. Some initial chitchat, though J was extremely dismayed upon hearing my reasons for leaving grad school, “There’s no difference! No matter where you go, it’s all the same! IT’s exactly the same!!” Uh huh. Yeah… he’s trying to finish. I think my reply was, “Sorry, dude. Grad school is grad school.”
We start out, and the guys (F and J) told me that the weekly poker night had been going on for about 6 months, and H is playing for the first time. At their question if I had played before, I answered, “Well, I haven’t played regularly for a long time.” Their answer: “Oh, regularly? Hmm…” hahhaha…. of course, at this, MH is just sitting back with a grin on his face. Honestly, I haven’t played at all since grad school, but then again, the first two years of grad school did have the weekly poker nights, mainly at my house, which MH was very well aware of. 😛
so we continue playing, and I’m playing pretty conservatively, with a couple random plays to see how the others were reacting. And I noticed a couple patterns. F had a tendency to lean back when he had a decent hand, and J would sit up straighter and almost brace himself when he had a good hand. Almost as if one is bracing for battle. MH’s eyebrows talks WAY too much, and twitches when he’s not sure. H was the hardest to read, but then I found out later that he had never played before, which makes sense that there was no pattern to read; he doesn’t have any established to read. And C would always play conservative.
With the knowledge in hand, I pushed and bluffed my way to being in the top two for both tournaments we played. Funny, sometimes I would ask them if they wanted me to explain how I won a specific hand, which they did. J quipped that he wasn’t sure what was worse; that I won the hand, or that would win and explain what I was thinking and how I won. Though all of them asked me to continue explaining.
I think I paid for my dinner and drinks that night with the poker winnings! hahahah!!! F wanted to make sure that I wasn’t going to be around for next week’s game, as they all joked that they weren’t looking all that forward to playing with me again. Oops. MH did get his wish for some trash talking, though.
Uncertainty can be happiness 