This past weekend was my 9th in the series of card weekends where I get together with 7 friends from college to play cards and rip on each other. We play the card game 500 which we played all the time in college (and I only play once per year now). Each year we rotate around to a different home around the area, and this time we played south of St. Paul.
The Wikipedia article on 500 – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/500_%28card_game%29 – has a pretty good review of the game. We play without the nullo (misere) options and the winner of the game is the pair with the highest score after 4 hands. We then play the best two out of three games to win a match. Once that’s done, each set of partners plays against each other set of partners. So we play 4 hands the best two out of three, three times with one partner. That usually takes about 3 hours. Since we typically start Saturday morning and end on Sunday noon (with a break for an interesting dinner on Saturday night), we usually get 4 or 5 series completed in the weekend.
The group of 8 consists of the following:
Shoney – he hosted this year – he lives in the Cities with his wife and two boys and manages a team for an insurance company
Kohler – he travels from the East Coast each year – he lives just outside Philadelphia in New Jersey and works for a major bank managing their auto loan marketing
Snelson – he lives in the Cities with his wife and two girls (almost exact same age as Katie and Amelia) and works in IT for a legal publishing company. He and I used to be partners in the WebAce Consulting business just after college.
Rosco – he lives in Watertown, SD with his wife and two girls. He owns and operates a pizza company in town. He is always responsible for bringing pizzas for lunch on Saturday – he usually brings 6-7, but it’s never enough.
EF – he lives in the Cities with his wife and daughter and they’re expecting another in June. He’s a lawyer for a firm led by a famous poker player’s brother
Vogs – he lives in St. Cloud with his wife, daughter and son. He’s a teacher of geography.
Dr. Stubbs – he’s a recently married professor of Chemistry in Maine. He made the long flight back to the Cities for the weekend.
We started on Saturday morning about 11 with the first pairings. Shoney broke out a vegetable tray that had the room in stunned silence for a few minutes. After that we ingested Rosco’s pizzas and complained that he didn’t bring enough. We played cards pretty hard core all afternoon – I was bidding like a madman at first and once I calmed down things starting going a lot better. Each year we choose an uncommon restaurant for supper so we can try something new that most people haven’t tried before. This year we headed up to Lindey’s Prime Steakhouse north of St. Paul. There are three choices on the menu and they are all 16oz steaks – the special prime, the prime or the chopped prime. We all decided on the special prime, and it was quite good. Our waitress made the most memorable moment of the weekend with this exchange:
Waitress: "So you guys get together every year to play cards?"
Kohler: "Yeah, we’ve been doing this for 9 years now. We all went to college together."
Waitress: "Let me guess what game you play – Texas Hold’Em or some kind of poker?"
Kohler: "You know what – I bet you’ll never guess what game we play. I’ll give you $100 if you can guess the game."
Waitress: (Says immediately) "500"
We were all stunned – we couldn’t believe she guessed it. Kohler was quite shocked and now had to reach in his pocket for some extra cash. The waitress was graduating from the University of Minnesota the following week, and now she had an $150 tip as a bit of a bonus.
We set a record on Saturday night for the earliest time calling it a night. We actually stopped playing at 12:30. We were all pretty embarassed, but we’re all too old to stress out about it. We started at about 7:50 the next morning, so that was our earliest start time ever. I ended up 9-4 in the matches which tied for first. More importantly I had a lot of fun catching up with everyone. Thanks to Becky for watching the kids for the weekend so I could keep the tradition alive.
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