A Double Shot of Captain

Recap of last 24 hours of my life:
Dec. 1, 12:30 a.m. -- Dust off remaining shreds of my chip stack and dignity.
12:31 a.m. -- Get made fun of like I'm the kid in elementary wearing Jordache jeans and velcro shoes.
1 a.m. -- Order Triple Whataburger value meal, replacing the Coke with a chocolate shake and getting an apple pie on the side. Oh, what the heck, go ahead and give me the large Coke too.
2 a.m. -- Re-organize garage, hang Christmas lights for every house on the block. Might as well write a blog since I'm up.
3 a.m. -- Got tired all of a sudden. Two options: Eat another two pounds of sugar or go to bed. Half a blog is good enough, I'll do the other halffffffzzzzzzzzzzzzz...
11 a.m. -- Alarm goes off. I get to drive to Weatherford to cover an 8-man football game so I can earn 1/30th of what I lost at the casino the night before.
1 p.m. -- Arrive in Weatherford to find the entire press box is taken up by a five-person radio broadcast team from the panhandle. There are five people here to cover a team whose entire roster is literally 14 players. Luckily there's a broken seat in the corner for me, so long as I don't mind listening to three analysts doing what one bad analyst should be doing.
3 p.m. -- The game is delayed because a player got tackled on the sideline, rolled onto the first down stick, and the stick is permanently bent and won't stand up straight. Seriously, that happened. It took 3 guys to lean on it and bend it back.
4 p.m. -- Tipton wins the Class C state championship. I use my field pass to photobomb as many state championship pictures as possible. In 50 years, I want people to say, "Who's that guy next to Bobby Joe with his index finger raised? Betty, you remember this guy?"
5 p.m. -- Write my story and attempt to leave. Luckily, they locked the stadium up. Walk 100 yards to other end of field, hunt down Southwestern Oklahoma State University athletic director, make him walk 100 yards back across field to gate...which has since been re-opened.
5:15 p.m. -- Reward myself for walking 200 yards by getting a 44 oz cherry vanilla Coke at Sonic on way out of town.
5:16 p.m. -- Slam fist into forehead after realizing I just spent 2.56% of my paycheck for the game on a Coke.
11 p.m. -- Might as well go ahead and finish that blog.

I want to introduce you to a guy named Captain. I haven't seen Captain in about two years but I'm going to assume he hasn't changed much. (If any of my poker friends have seen him recently and can offer an update, go for it.)
Captain is an African-American in his early 50s. He exclusively wears Fubu velvet sweatshirts with matching sweatpants. His favorite colors are -- in order -- gold, white, and black. Kangol hats. Sunglasses with no tint. A fair amount of bling. Salt and pepper goattee, always freshly trimmed. He's about 5-foot-8, roughly 275 pounds. Enough muscle to keep you from going nose-to-nose with him but enough fat to know you can win a race to the door if you have to.
And don't worry, he'll give you plenty of chances to fight him. He says lots of inappropriate and offensive things, and he talks a good fight. But mainly he just likes to drink and gamble.
I don't know Captain's real name. He always signed up for the poker games as Captain, and he liked to drink 7 or 8 Captains while he was playing, so it seemed like a good name.
You want to play poker with Captain. The later into the evening the better. And if you write a blog, he is an absolute GOLDMINE.
I have played a lot of poker with Captain. It seemed like he would magically appear wherever I happened to be playing, which was great. He had some ties to Lawton and played there frequently when I lived there, but he also played at Riverwind and Newcastle a lot. If I saw him at one of those places, I didn't leave until he did.
These are my two favorite Captain stories.

Captain's poker winrate hovered right around 5 percent. But when he won, he won BIG. One night at Riverwind (in the old poker room, not the new one), Captain was winning every hand. He was ordering double shots every time he busted someone, which was quite frequently.
As Captain drank more and more, he was being more and more inappropriate with the waitresses, and his distraction with the waitresses was slowing the game to a halt and driving off the players. But I wasn't about to leave. For one thing, Captain had already won a big pot off of me, so I wanted to get my chips back. Besides that, his luck was bound to change, and this was a rare opportunity to win some serious money from a terrible poker player. Usually, Captain would just run $1000 straight into the ground, and one entertaining hour later he would be gone for the night. This time he had over $3k in front of him.
Of course, on this night it was impossible to tell exactly how much money Captain had in front of him, because he was too drunk to stack up his chips. They just lay in a multi-colored mound in an area generally in front of him. He was taking up enough space for two or three players but we were playing short-handed so it didn't matter. When he wanted to bet, he just slammed his forearm on the table and shoved out a random number of chips, usually about $500 worth, whether the pot had $20 or $2000 in it. After winning one pot, he tried to scoop his chips onto his pile, but his pile was too big and some of them went over the rail and onto the floor. One of the poker room managers went over and picked up about $30 worth of chips that had fallen to the ground. For some reason, Captain was convinced there was one more dollar on the ground.
He got so worked up about this single $1 chip that he got on all fours under the table looking for it. That's when I discovered Captain's drunk superpower.
You know how some people have superpowers that only come out when they are absolutely wasted? Well, the guy sitting next to me in the game had gone to the restroom, and he returned to see Captain on the ground looking for this chip. We are on the opposite end of the table from Captain's scavenger hunt. The guy next to me leans over and says, "What is he doing?"
I whispered, "I think he left a drink under there."
Turns out, Captain's drunk superpower is supernatural hearing. He shot up from under the table, stared right at me and said, "You mother******, what did you just say to me?"
I may have crapped my pants a little bit.
I don't remember what I said, but I backtracked and apologized well enough to avoid getting shot.


One night at Newcastle, Captain was in an especially abusive mood. He was mad about losing and was three or four drinks over his average consumption level.
The Asian man on Captain's immediate right was also drinking heavily, so much so that he was almost passed out. This man was probably 45 years old, weighed 110 pounds and could not speak a word of English. He muttered Chinese under his breath and took a long time to make any decision. Captain was not a fan of any of these things.
I'll save all of the racist vitriol Captain spewed that night. Luckily, the other guy couldn't understand a word of it anyway.
I've heard that burping is an accepted thing in some Asian communities. Nevertheless, I was pretty surprised when this middle-aged Asian dude let one rip without the slightest attempt to cover his mouth. He was just sitting there, staring straight ahead, and let it fly. I remember being seriously afraid that Captain was going to hurt this guy. Captain leaned over, looked right at the guy, stared him down for a good 30 seconds, and even lowered his sunglasses to look him dead in the eye. But Captain never said a word, and after an awkward 30 seconds, play resumed as usual. I was utterly shocked that he didn't say anything. Captain doesn't go 30 seconds without saying something under any circumstances.
A good 30 minutes passed, and Captain was on his best behavior. The Asian man's wife was now sitting behind him. I figured maybe Captain was going easy on him because of her.
Then, out of nowhere, breaking the dead silence, Captain attacked.
He turned, got right in the guy's face, and let out a burp three times as big as the first one. He shrugged his shoulders with his palms up, the ultimate "What you gonna do now?" pose. But the Asian guy was so drunk/tired that his wife was literally having to wake him up to look at his cards every hand. He probably didn't care about Captain's burp and definitely had no interest in fighting him, so he just went back to sleep. Captain stared at him for a good minute or two.
I tried to keep it together but I couldn't. As soon as I realized that no physical harm was going to be done, I burst out laughing. Captain turned to me and said, "You think that's funny?"
This made me laugh even louder and I said, "Yeah, actually I think it's really funny." I couldn't stop laughing for at least five minutes. I have no idea how the rest of the table kept from laughing, but I was the only one.
This incident came after the first one, and after I had played with Captain many times. Because he knew I lived in Lawton, he always thought I was in the military. I probably told him 10 times that I had never been in the military, but eventually I realized that my military experience was the only thing he liked about me. This allowed me to get away with an ill-timed bout of the giggles.
"I like you cause you're in the Army," he said, "but I'm still gonna bust your m************ a** on the poker table."

Helpful Comments

All right, jerks. Here's another blog.

Poker has not been good the past month. (If your income is < 0, is it called outcome?) What's worse is that I can't even leave the casino in peace after getting curb-stomped.
There's a portly middle-aged fellow who is a regular player at Riverwind, goes by Blade because he sells knives for a living. His picture is currently atop this blog because I hate myself. Blade is kind, well-meaning, and an absolute pain to play with. He is constantly trying to change seats or decks of cards because he is extremely superstitious. On top of that, he takes forever on every decision and goes to great lengths to avoid putting any money in a pot without the absolute best possible hand.
Blade was not at my table on Tuesday, but he walked past and said hi to me and a few of the other regulars. "Matt, you're too tough for these guys." Evidently, I wasn't too tough for them since they were beating the crap out of me. After I dusted off the rest of my stack, I walked right past the cash-out cage toward the door. "Matt!" Blade hollered as I neared the exit, "Tell 'em where you got it."

You have to know Blade to fully appreciate that story, but I don't even know the name of the fellow who decided to make fun of me on Friday. Again, I wasted eight hours of my life trying to win a single pot of poker, and when that failed I simply wanted to walk to my car, drive to Whataburger and order up the 5,000-calorie pity party.
This time, as I again waltzed past the cash-out cage toward the door, a guy sitting in the waiting area yelled at me. "Bro, it ain't gonna rain in here." I had played with this drooler a couple of times in my life but I don't know his name or why he was talking to me. I gave him a puzzled look.
"Your pants, man. It ain't gonna rain in here, you don't need the high waters. Try some jeans next time bro." Then he bursts out laughing.
I was wearing sweatpants and a long-sleeved T-shirt. I looked down to see that yes, in fact, my pants were a little short. This was likely a combination of the fact that I had gained 15 pounds over Thanksgiving and that I buy generic sweatpants from Target that aren't really made for tall people. Also, I don't go to the casino trying to impress idiots like the guy who was at that moment laughing in my face.
He clarified that he was "just f***ing with you, bro." I nodded, fake-smiled and decided I deserved an apple pie with my Triple Whataburger.

I got another blog coming soon, a couple of poker-etiquette stories about a character named Captain. Was going to put it all in this one but those three orders of Whataburger fries made me tired.