I think so far one of my favorite things to do in Puzzle Pirates is to sit down to a good poker table. What is a good poker table? Well, for one, you don’t have people who are binary (Fold or All In). Next, good table chatter… Usually good chatter consists of just random chat about some subject, or even talk about poker, or in the case of Puzzle Pirate the chatter can be incharacter piratey stuff. Sometimes, however, the chatter is, well, let me just give an example:
Mrbert: So what is everyone’s favorite suited pocket hand?
Killerjoy: A pair of Aces.
Mrbert: Naturally.
Gogoboots: I like a pair of Queens because they are more likely to turn into three of a kind.
Picklehead: I prefer to bluff with a pair of twos.
Ishiro: Isn’t it kind of hard to have a suited pair?
See that guy at the end? That’s me. It took me another twenty minutes to explain why you couldn’t have a suited pair. I mean, it took a couple minutes just to explain what suited meant (same suit). Then a few people at the table were insisting that poker was played with a six deck shuffle. My attempts to point out that blackjack, not poker, is the game that uses a multideck shoe. (“A shoe? You are making this stuff up!”) Gogoboots agreed that only one deck was used, and that was why she preferred Queens, because a single deck has twelve Queens. It took another five minutes to understand that when she said “Queens” what she meant was “face cards”, you know, Jacks, Queens and Kings.
After a while, I gave up and decided that indeed ignorance is bliss, and messing with the ignorant is hilarious:
Mrbert: I love to get a flush.
Ishiro: This morning I had a double flusher.
Gogoboots: What’s that?
Mrbert: Its rare. It is when you get two flushes in a row.
Picklehead: No, its when you can make two flushes with the same hand.
Mrbert: Oh, I’m thinking of a b2b-flush.
Picklehead: Yeah.
Samson: Billions of Blue Blistering Barnacles!
Killerjoy: I had a triple flusher once. It was awesome.
Mrbert: I bet! The chances of that are like a zillion to one!
Ishiro: The worst though is when you get upper decked.
Picklehead: Yeah! I hate that!
Mrbert: Is that when everyone else is dealt a pocket pair but you?
Picklehead: No, it is when you get a good pair and then two or more people deal into royal straights.
Mrbert: Wow. That does sound awful.
Gogoboots: I did that once.
Gogoboots: Flippered into a royal straight.
Ishiro: You have to be careful or you’ll flipper into a tilt.
Gogoboots: What?
Mrbert: A tilt. When you miss your straight by one card, like 4,5,6,7,9.
Samson: Billions of Blue Blistering Barnacles!
Ishiro: I’m going to get a high score!
[everyone folds]
Ishiro: Roasters!
Gogoboots: Roasters?
Ishiro: Kenny Rogers.
Mrbert: Who is that?
Ishiro: He’s a gambler.
Mrbert: Didn’t he win the WSOP last year.
Killerjoy: He did. I saw it live on TV.
Picklehead: I played in the WSOP last year, made it to the semi-final round.
Samson: He really knows when to hold ’em and when to fold ’em.
You tell Samson: Bravo!
Yes, Samson, Bravo indeed.
The only thing worst than crappy chatter at a Puzzle Pirates poker table, are those “8s 8” idiots. You see, in real life, when someone makes an extraordinary effort to save, say, five dollars, they might say something like “Hey, five bucks is five bucks, man.” This indicates that saving the five bucks was worth the effort. In Puzzle Pirates, you don’t have dollars, you have Pieces of Eight (PoE or poe), and comparatively they have little value. Buying anything worthwhile in the game literally costs thousands of PoE. In poker, when some idiot goes All In before the flop and the table folds their blinds and he earns a whopping 3 or 6 or 8 PoE, what he would like to say is, “Hey, eight pieces of eight is eight pieces of eight, man.” But as we all should be well aware, typing is a skill some people refuse to learn, and so saying that would be too much, so instead he says, “8s 8.” Now, if this were a rare occurance, it would be fine… but most of these jackholes say it after every hand. “8s 8”, “5s 5”, “120s 120”, “807s 807”. Those people and the binary All In or Fold twerps drive me away from more tables than anything else.
It seems odd t’ say that thar be a seedy underbelly t’ Puzzle Pirates, but I be jus’ nay ready t’ believe that so many swabbies be actively roleplayin’. This underbelly I speak o’ be greed.