Liquor in the front Poker in the back

I was recently in Connecticut for a quick baby sitting job (oh happy day!). We have always played setback/pitch as a family, but this time I also asked my Son in Law to give me a refresher on Poker. They play regularly here in the trailer park and I have had the desire to start up. I also started playing it on Arcadium. I also found Trickster cards for some setback action.

Is card playing a big part of anyone's growing up? I started pretty young. My parents always played and I remember that my father played for higher stakes than what we played for, when he worked at Eastern Airlines. One of the women that plays poker here mentioned that she also grew up in a card playing family. I mean we would do it every time we got together. Always making sure we had our change with us. I also play setback pretty regularly at my condo building with friends.

And honestly, I am not high, but sometimes I think, how frickin clever a deck of cards are and how perfect they are. Like the distance between home and first. The beauty of a good hand.

I also have realized just how regional games are. We now live in a place where people from all over have come to live and I hear words like bunco and eucher.

So what is your card playing history?

 

Oh yeah, the midwest. Rummy, euchre, crazy eights were regulars. My parents were in a pinochle club and maybe a euchre club. We had something we called Michigan rummy (?) that had it's own little board the we bet pennies in. And my brother and friends played something called bloody knuckles. I cannot remember the particulars, but if you lost, the winner took the deck, made a staggered edge and hit/scraped your knuckles equal to the amount you lost by. You wanted a small number. No one has ever heard of that. I don't know. We bled.
In high school, I was in a small study hall with mostly underclassmen. But there were three senior girls and we were friends. The teacher let us play gin rummy everyday and made everyone else study. We'd play quite a few hands in in 45 minutes.

Then as young adults we played a lot of Uno.

One of my greatest tribulations in FL is that people don't know what euchre is unless they grew up in the midwest.

 

Lots of cribbage with my dad.

Euchre was huge in rural Ontario, people played it during spares in high school.

 

Contract bridge was our game of choice in high school, which goes to show how WASPy the place was.

 

Yes!

 

When I started college I quickly learned to play sheepshead, which was the primary card game in eastern Wisconsin.

 

Played a ton of whist when I lived in the cold, frigid Upper Midwest.

 

Have played in a monthly Texas hold'em group for almost 20 years.

Our current family favorites are Kings in the Corner and Phase 10.

Will be playing some euchre with my brother in law and sister in law on vacation next month.

Played a lot of cribbage in college, but none since then and have forgotten how to play it.

As a young boy, I can remember the Sunday visits to grandma's where the adults played a version of Michigan Rummy, called Tripoley

 

My maternal grandmother taught me how to play canasta when I was a kid, but I forgot how by the time I was a teenager.

 

The old man was a big crib player and my wife plays with her mother occasionally when she is over.

Euchre was huge during lunch and spares in my suburban Toronto high school. I never played but knew many who did and I was pleased to see the game still out there when some kids would kill hours on bus rides in the OHL with euchre games.

 

Anybody who grew up in the Midwest and took long bus rides for high school sports knows how to play euchre.

Card playing is big in my family and we usually break out a deck or two during the holidays or other gatherings. Oh Hell gets more entertaining the more people play it, and my parents were big pinnocle players.

In recent years we’ve enjoyed a newer game called Five Crowns. Have even played it virtually (a different deck in each location) over Zoom.