Newmarket Edges

My parents never really approved of me playing poker. I think they worried I was going to gamble away all my money. But it was my parents who introduced me to playing cards for money. 

When I was just a small kid, I don't what age exactly, 7 or 8 maybe? My parents would meet up with friends on a Saturday night to have a chat and play cards with some tea and cake after. They only played for pennies, I assume it was just for the sake of socialising more than anything. 

In the beginning, while the grown ups played their game, I was content playing with toy cars or my aunt's ornamental crystal animal collection. The spiky hedgehog was my favourite, it was basically a glass ball with sharp spikes all over, it seemed both delicate and dangerous at the same time. 

Anyways, I digress. At some point in time, years later, the card game caught my attention, I wanted to join in. The game was Newmarket. I'd say it is mostly luck but as I would eventually learn, there were still edges to be found. The whole deck is dealt out evenly amongst players, plus one "dead" hand. The basic premise is someone will start by playing their lowest card, let's say the 2 of spades and then whoever has the 3 of spades plays it, and then the 4 and so on until the whole run of cards are played BUT because there's a bunch of "missing" cards in the dead hand, you inevitably get to a point where no-one has the next card in the sequence, so if you're the last one to play a card, you get to start a new run based on your lowest cards. The winner is the first person to play all their cards. 

Taking pity on me as just a young child, the adults decided I could play at a discounted buyin, so while they all put in 6 pence per hand, I only had to put in 4 pence.

And I won. Every session. For years. 

"I don't know how he does it!" the adults would say in disbelief. I didn't either, at that time anyways, I guess I was just special. It was a glorious feeling. 

Eventually, the adults got sick of my dominance. As I recall it was my dad who spearheaded the call for me to buyin for the full 6 pence a hand, and it would be my undoing. It turns out I wasn't special at all, no, I was not some kind of card game savant. In a game that was generally distributing the winnings quite evenly, I was winning the full purse but at a discounted entry, so of course I was winning in the long term but that came to an abrupt end.

The first few sessions paying the full buyin, were nothing of note, maybe a little down, maybe a little up or somewhere about even but then catastrophe struck. As with any game of chance, you can have a bad run of luck, or a good one. A good winning session would typically be an 80p to £1.20 profit, a bad losing session 60-80p. I never saw anything more extreme than that over years of playing until I smashed all records by losing £1.80 in one go. Losing that much wasn't even a thing, so I didn't have any more money with me. I was out the game. I was in tears. 

But I am a stubborn son of a bitch, so I wasn't going to give up. Having raided my piggy bank, I was back in action the next week. I lost again but maybe only 60p this time. This carried on for a few more weeks before I finally began to think about the game, how it worked, what I could do to influence it. 

I had noticed that every now and again, when someone got the chance to choose a new lowest card (for example, maybe they had two 4s to choose from as their lowest card) they would try and see what other cards had been played previously to get an idea of what runs may or may not help them clear their hand but you couldn't always see the played cards as they were stacked up in a pile, so this was my started point, track all played cards. That is hard to do, so I developed a tracking system. I moved my card up slightly if the card above mine was played, and moved a card down if the card below was in the dead hand. It wasn't much but in a game where I was the only person taking it so seriously, it was enough to win. 

I never encountered the same highs and lows as before, I still lost on occasion but more often than not I would book a win, once again leading the adults to wonder how I managed it. I had discovered "edges". I had figured out how to beat the adults at their card game. That special feeling was back.