I've been playing poker for a good long while. I don't remember when I first learned to play, but I couldn't have been more than 5 or 6. I like to imagine that sometime in preschool (I was still in preschool at age 5) my parents sat me down to teach me some life skills, like not to draw to an inside straight. I suspect that the truth is much more boring. I probably got jealous of all the adults staying up late and decided to crash the party.

It should be noted that my whole family plays poker. Both my parents, my aunt and uncle, and my grandparents when they were still around. They used to have a pretty good tradition of starting up games at family gatherings after dinner, and sometimes they'd play for hours. My mom will tell stories of her mother yelling down the stairs to her father that it was dawn and he should stop playing cards and go to bed. So I know where my mom and my uncle get it from. I don't know what's going on with my dad, but he's got a very weird set of "bar skills" (poker, pool, and a really neat trick for opening up jars that he got from a bar tender somewhere). I suspect my mom had a hand in most of this.

My family taught me well enough that I could probably sit down to a game in the 1840's and not get shot. I might even win some money. And all of this might give the reader the impression that "we take cards seriously in this household, and don't you forget it!"

This is not, in fact, the case. We are not serious about poker. We are anti-serious about poker. And in the event that someone forgets and starts spouting out nonsense about 5 card draw nothing wild, we have an arsenal of obscure, arcane poker games that are generally pretty effective at defying any sort of real poker strategy that people might try to come up with.

I was very glad, then, to find out that I had a set of like-minded friends in Pittsburgh. Last Friday night, 6 of us got together and sat down to some of the strangest poker I've played in a while. At the table were myself, Chris, Big J, Little J, S, and B. The mood for the night was pretty much set when we realized that no one had anything resembling chips, so we made do with colored zip ties, which for mysterious reasons B had in abundance. Chris hasn't played much poker before and he was kind of afraid of it, so my first goal was to help Chris get over this fear with a game that is entirely out of the players' control, known as Night Baseball. 7 cards, face down, and no looking. And things went down hill from there. I don't remember all of the variants we played, but here are a few. Some are probably familiar to people reading this, and some...probably aren't.

Night Baseball (No peeky)

7 cards dealt face down to each player (9 in some variants). No one can look at their cards. This is a "roll-your-own" game, meaning that each person turns over cards until they've beat the highest hand on the table. If you run out of cards, you're out. Otherwise, you bet. 3's and 9's are wild, 4 up gets you another card face down. I love this game. For some reason, I do well at it.

High-Low Baseball

A 7-card stud variant. 3's and 9's are wild, 4 up gets you another card face up. After the last card has been dealt, there's the normal round of betting, and then all players declare, and then they bet again. Declaring means announcing whether you're playing high, low, or both. A perfect low is A 2 3 4 6 of different suits. High winner and low winner split the pot. If someone goes high-low, they have to win both ways, but then they get the whole pot, all to themselves.

Classic 5 card draw

Big J brought this one in, probably to balance out the dual bad influences of B and me. 5 card draw, a pair of jacks or better to start the betting, and if no one can bet, then the hand is re-dealt. This is an ante game and the pot rides until someone wins it. If there are multiple deals, there are multiple antes. A very traditional poker game, and it was probably the seminal example of poker before all of the Texas Hold'Em craziness.

Sign of the Cross

Very similar to Texas Hold'em. Each player gets 2 cards, and there are 5 cards in the center, face down, in the shape of a cross. Cards in the center are revealed 1 by 1. Players make the best hand they can using their two hold cards and 3 in the middle. In this game, each player must pick a row of cards from the cross.

Kinky 7-stud

You can do a lot of things with wild cards to change the flavor of the game. In this variant, there are pairs of wild cards: KJ QQ 69. You have to be holding both cards of a pair, but then both are wild.

Mark Foley 7-stud

Similar to kinky 7-stud. Any pair of cards that adds up to 16 is wild. J = 11, Q = 12, etc. A = 1.

Poker Jargon 7-stud

Wild: "Deuces, aces, one-eyed faces, suicide kings, candlestick queens."

Follow the Queen

A more well known 7-stud variant. Queens are wild, and if a queen is dealt face up, then the card dealt face up immediately after the queen is also wild. Until another queen is dealt... My dad hates this game. We pull it out at home when he has too much money.

Something I made up when it was really late

Sort of like a cross between Indian Poker and Night Baseball. Each player gets 1 card face down. Without looking, they bet. Then they look at their cards and bet again.
Variant 1 After the first round of betting, but before people look at their cards, they have the option to trade in their cards. Then they look and bet again.
Variant 2 The winner is the person with the highest total of their card + the value of the card to their right.