I think I was 7 years old or something the first time I played poker. It was 5 card draw (as was all poker-games when we where kids) and we played with play-money. I didn´t like it much, though. I was used to playing hearts and whist and stuff like that, and when I played poker it felt like I didn´t play cards, but instead was dealt cards which I kept to myself for a while and then showed to everyone else.

But despite preferring other card-games, I still played a little poker every now and then. When I was about 10 years or so, the poker-games became more interesting as we began to play for several different kind of stakes.

First up was water-poker. The punishment for losing was that you had to drink water, and the reward for winning was that you didn´t have to drink water, but could instead enjoy the suffering of those who did. We were sadistic little rats. The ante was half a glass, and then we could bet/raise/re-raise on top of that. If you fold or lose a hand, you had to drink the amount of glasses you had ”put in the pot”.

I wisely folded a lot because half a glass per hand was a cheap exit in these games. But some took risks by staying in hands where the amount of glasses per player had reach numbers they knew they would have an awful time drinking if they lost. I can tell you that things got really tense around the table when glasses per player reached 10+. It is a small miracle none of us got seriously ill in these games.

Another variant was knuckle-poker. Doesn´t sound very pleasant, does it? Instead of betting glasses of water to drink, one bets a numbers of hits over the knuckles with the short end of the deck. An extra bonus to the winner of the hand was that he had the honour of executing this mideval punishment. First the knuckles would get red, then they would start to bleed. The level of your skills had little to do with poker in these games, and more to do with how fast and accurately you could swing the deck over somebody´s knuckles. True pros could make someone bleed with a single swing. I wisely stayed out of these games, but enjoyed many as a spectator.

I don´t know if water-poker and knuckle-poker are international games, but another variant we played (this time with just a male friend) definately is. It was strip-poker. This wasn´t some kind sexual experiment, if that is what you are thinking. We played on his computer. The women you could choose from to play against (a massive number of two) where highly pixelated and probably fictional. The blonde was much hotter than the brunette, so we always played against her (until we one glorious day beat her).

This friend of mine came from a very religious family, which wouldn´t have reacted with undivided joy if they had known what we did down there in the basement. Settle down, readers, we played poker, not with unmentionable body-parts. There was always a risk we would get caught, and this added a lot to the excitement. Frequently, his mother would come down to us, and whenever that happened, he turned off the computer. The slightest sound coming from the stairs or hallway, would cause him to turn the computer off at the speed of light. In retrospect, I figure it must have been very suspicious that we often sat in front of a turned off computer when she paid us a visit.

I remember when we beat the blonde. She was naked except for a strategic shade around her most private part. The computer said something like ”press Space when you are done looking”. Needless to say, we didn´t press Space until after a good 15 minutes.