How To Play In-Between

This afternoon, I went to my one of my secondary school friend's place to play poker. We've been doing this for about a year now. Once every few weeks, we'll get together and just hang around for a whole afternoon and play poker.

All we have is a table, cards, chips, tidbits, the television playing in the background and each other's company. Hours will pass by in a blink! And we never really talk about anything meaningful, or profound. I think it's a very guy thing to be able to hang out without talking about "feelings" and shit like that. I like it.

Anyway, our buy-in for poker is usually $20. It's not too much, but it's not too little either. Just enough for there to be some excitement, yet not too much such that you feel guilty for paying. I like to think of it as watching a movie on a weekend and then going out for coffee after that and then a meal. I spend about the same amount of money.

And if you consider the fact that me losing $20 is the worst-case-scenario, it's actually quite worth it. There's potential for me to earn some money! And it's fun.

Anyway, I had a bunch of bad hands, or wasn't really into it, or am just lousy at poker in general...such that after awhile, I was down $10, half my buy-in. I won some back, lost some again, and yeah...pretty bad. And then we switched to in-between!

One round of in-between is played like this:

1) Each player puts a certain amount of money into the pot, for example, $0.10.

2) Each player is dealt two cards. He then has to make a decision to get another card, or just give up his hand.

3) The main goal of the game is to be dealt a card which is in-between your first two cards. Like I said, if you have two cards which are very close to each other, you can fold. If you have something like a...2 and a King, then it's quite obvious you should play on.

4) To play on, you bet a certain amount of money, no larger than the size of the pot. If the card dealt to you is in-between, you get the money you bet. If it's more or less, the money you bet goes into the pot. If the card dealt is the same as either cards in your hand, you have lose double the original money you bet.

5) Order of play is decided based on who has the lowest probability of winning. For example, a player with 3 and 9 will go before a player with 2 and 10.

It's freaking brainless, and the thing is, if you have insanely good luck, like me, you can stand to win a lot of money. I kept getting 2s and Kings or Queens. I just kept taking money from the pot, and I soon, I had won over $5. The thing about in-between is that unlike poker, it's not so much based on calculation, and it's not as confrontational.

So yeah, that's in-between!