I tell Jenny, "I'm not the Spade thief. I didn't cheat the House of Cards. Gyp had two partners. I was there to cheat. The other, the player I call Shemp, was there to kill. He's the one you want.

You have to believe me."

"The Rules," answers Jenny, "say I have to let you play. Nowhere do they say I have to believe you."

The doorbell rings.

"That," says Jenny, "will be our final player." She opens the door. Standing there, holding up an As, is Shemp.

Why is it, that the person with the worst breath always wants to tell you a secret?" I was laughing hysterically when I recently heard this at the Las Vegas Improv. I learned to always check my breath before telling someone a secret. I laughed so much that evening; the laughter energized me and reset my attitude. Humor and laughter are imperative, especially in the world we live in today. We must laugh to water the joy in our hearts and stay young.

I first heard this saying from T.J. Cloutier. After a few confrontations with small pairs the reason this saying holds true became clear. Small pocket pairs are a slight favorite over two over cards but they are big dogs to over pairs. In no limit hold em tournaments there are a lot of all in confrontations between a pair vs. two over cards because of the stack size to blind ratio. Barry Greenstein went twenty out of twenty in coin toss situations when he won the 2004 World Poker Open $10,200 buy in WPT championship.

The heavy rains had blown over, and the evening air was crisp and refreshing. I decided to visit the old Normandie Casino in Gardena, Calif. One of the students in my poker class at the Claude Pepper Sr. Citizen Center claimed it was a great place to play low/middle-limit hold'em.

We always think of hindsight as being 20-20 relating to the clarity of our vision after the fact. However, I think many times one's hindsight can be very cloudy and not exactly 20-20. Hindsight or retrospection can be very helpful for us to improve our play at the tables. Instead of complaining and, for that matter, boring your opponents and friends about the bad beats you have suffered, use your hindsight to learn and improve. Or, put another way...don't rue it----use it!

Our American culture has allowed us to become accustomed to instant gratification. We expect to get what we want in the shortest amount of time possible. Perhaps this helps to explain the recent aura of impatience that has overtaken the new generation of poker players. Each new player that gets attracted to this game due to the explosion of television exposure seems to expect to become successful and profitable in only a couple of months time.

Playing cards can be hard work. Working smart is playing worthwhile hands and it's betting on hands that will pay the most returns. Playing hard means playing against the odds and playing hands that are either not likely to show up or won't pay that much if they do.

He was a major player on the American landscape during the first half of the 20th Century. He ran with the powerful, the rich, the famous, and the notorious. He knew everyone who was anyone - and everybody knew Herbert Bayard Swope.

Swope was born in 1882 and grew up in New York City. He found his friends among the pool players, horse bettors, and gambling halls of Big City America. His first job was cashier at a race track.

Sometimes I amaze myself with the brilliance of my play but then if I examine the circumstances closely, I find that my play isn't all that brilliant, but only really relatively better than the grossly stupid play I'm playing against. This is not news. It's a proven poker fact that we make most of our money from the incorrect play of others. What's worth noting, though, is how smart the stupidity of others can make us think we are. And how much trouble that leads to.

Case in point: my own silly self.

In some poker rooms in the early days of poker in Las Vegas, one low-limit, high-volume table would be designated as a "snatch" table. Specially trained dealers would visibly take four or five dollars from the pot as the rake, and then discretely take another six, eight, 10, even 12 dollars by "palming" the chips. These dealers were called "snatch dealers." They actually were "snatching" chips from the pot. One such snatch dealer was Linda Davis who as a young woman was one of the first female poker dealers in Las Vegas and one of the first female snatch dealers.