a hundred degrees

Mexican Sweat

I never learned to play poker for money or chips. We didn't do that in my family. I'm a lousy liar anyway. We just played hands. There was no overall winner, just a new one each hand. I remember playing enough that I learned the ranks of the hands fairly well. I also remember loving wild cards. I'd call goofy things like Dr Pepper (2's, 4's, & 10's) and Baseball (3's, 6's, & 9's) in the same hand.

In addition to five card draw my dad taught me to play Mexican Sweat. This is a variation where everybody gets seven cards face down and you take turns revealing one card at a time until you have the best hand on the table. There is no thought or skill here. Even in the betting version I imagine it is somewhat like betting on a horse race since everything is played in the open. Well, on the theoretical unrigged horse race, anyway.

Lexie and Kevin and I have played Sorry! a couple of times lately and he handled it pretty well. There was one of those amusing-to-the-parents-not-so-to-the-child moments when I drew the necessary card to move my last man home. Lexie said, "Daddy won." I confirmed, "I won." Kevin, his face and voice full of the tearful frustration of a sore loser, angrily protested, "We all win! It's a fun game!"

Say it enough Son, and maybe some day you'll start to believe it. I've tried to teach him that games are meant to be fun to play, not just to win. That way Daddy doesn't have to throw every game just to keep peace. It was interesting to see this anti-intuitive lesson internalized and thrown back with the fire of the short-shrifted. I think that he is very much like me.

Anyway, I brought up Sorry! just to say that he was doing very well at counting spaces and moving pawns. There are many games available once you understand the basics of playing cards and I was convinced by his skills elsewhere evinced that I could begin teaching him to match ranks and suits. I sat with him tonight and he sorted some cards by rank. I had him tell me what each card's suit was as he placed it. Lexie came in and encouraged him, too.

Before he was fully through the deck, he stopped and asked me to shuffle and deal the cards. There was no skill game that he was prepared for, and it was already nearly time for bed, so I dealt Mexican Sweat. We only played two hands and the winning hand was in front of Lexie both times. Still, it is worthy of note that the first game my son played with standard playing cards was a poker variation.

Posted to Family and Home at January 27, 2005 9:36 PM