Loved the discussion of poker in the notes.
I used to love playing it now and then. In theory, I still do, but it's probably been fifteen years or more since I've bothered playing it for the very reason BK describes, the predominance of Texas Hold-em and whatever endless variations there are.
What I loved was "neighborhood poker", just settling in for an evening of "dealer's choice" which would consist of draw and stud poker, of both the five- and seven-card varieties, with only a few permitted variations just for fun so the evening wouldn't get totally crazy. I was okay at it, not great, and I never had the nerve to sit down at it in a casino. But it's an amazing game.
In the mid-1990s I was attending a monthly Friday-night game with other friends at author Susan Brownmiller's apartment in the Village. The game, the food, drink, and camaraderie were wonderful. Eventually, people began introducing the newly popular Hold-Em games, and little by little, they became "it". For me, games that lasted beyond one hand and required mucho strategizing, ceased to be fun. But I was also getting involved in musical theater and other things up here, so I reluctantly dropped out. Some of the other folks were also getting into mah-jongg (sp?), of which I know nothing, and those evenings were morphing into that.
That's fascinating, though, about the L.A.-area clubs. I was around them a few times and walked through them in the course of doing other things with friends (maybe we ate there?), but when it came to poker, I never ventured outside the comfort level of a friend's house or apartment.
