_When You Get into a Game of Draw in California It Is Well to Ascertain the Rules in Advance._
"Before sitting into a game of poker anywhere near tidewater out on the Pacific coast you’ll always find it a pretty good scheme to make a few preliminary inquiries of your fellow players as to the kind of poker you’re expected to mix up with," said a traveling man who had recently returned to the East after a tour on the Slope. "Because I neglected to do this myself on several occasions I got into all sorts of embarrassing situations and all colors of poker trouble all the way from Portland, Ore., to San Diego, Cal., and the fellows with whom I did little stunts at draw—all good people, business men I met with through letters—put me down as the worst jay in a game of cards that ever crossed the Rocky Mountains. The folks out there think we’re all jays back here, anyhow, if for no other reason than that we haven’t enough brains to migrate in a body to the Pacific Slope, but they complacently told me that I was the worst of the species they had ever seen, simply because I couldn’t seem to get the hang of the queer old game they call poker out in that country.
"The game they dub poker out there isn’t poker at all, in my opinion. It’s a hybrid sort of affair, full of fancy moves that must have been chucked into the original game by early California vaqueros with such a taste for embellishment that they had to tack gilt fringe on to their pants and to encircle their hats with silver cable. Whatever they call it, it’s not American draw poker by a darned sight. The kind of poker that I was raised on—the real thing, the article of draw that we play on this side of the Alleghanies—doesn’t take any more account of the joker, for instance, than it does of the card case; but out in California they think a man’s plumb blind crazy if he registers a kick over having the joker in the deck. I’d as lief play old maid or grab for corn-silk cigarettes as play draw poker with the joker mixed up in it; but out there I had to take the game as it was served up, and, as between poker with a joker and no poker at all, I, of course, accepted the lesser of the two evils and played. But I got dumped on the game for about 2,000 miles of coast line, and that, too, by people who didn’t have to count themselves because they were so many at the game. The trouble was that I played the game of draw that I was brought up on and they played their crossbred game, and the result was just about as queer as it would be to see a baseball pitcher chucking up a Rugby football to a cricket batsman with a fence picket in his hands.