AIt may seem like a long way from a kiddy board game on a threadbare rug in a simple Pennsylvania home to dollar deuces wild and the luxurious hotel rooms, free meals, and first-class entertainment given to us by palace-like casinos all over the world. Yet the spirit is exactly the same—intense, competitive, playing to win.

Growing Up as a kid, Where I am today is even more remarkable considering where I was back then. My father is an evangelical fundamentalist minister, so I was a “PK,” a preacher’s kid. We had no cards or dice in our home, let alone a computer or an electronic payment utility such as an eWallet or a FirePay Account. If a game that we wanted to play came with dice, we’d have to throw them away and use a spinner from one of our other kiddie games instead. Cards and dice were symbols of gambling, which was very much against our religion. But our family always played games. From the simple don’t-have-to-read- the-rules games, I graduated to Chinese checkers, chess, and finally Monopoly, the ultimate of all board games, I thought. Many first-born children are resentful of their younger siblings, but not I! I was exceedingly grateful when my parents provided me with two sisters with whom to play games. My parents were grateful too, because now I didn’t pester them to play with me all the time. My family played games almost every night except Wednesdays (which was prayer- meeting night); on Sundays we played religious games.

Because we were not allowed to have playing cards in the house, I didn’t learn the four suits until I was in my early thirties. We weren’t even allowed to play games like Old Maid, because that would have had the appearance of sinful behavior. Someone might have seen us playing and thought we were engaged in a poker game! When I got married, I finally started to play cards, but not “real” card games. We went through a period of Old Maid, Rook, and Pit, just enough to broaden my life a little bit.

GIN RUMMY FUN

When I was thirty-five, things changed: I left the fundamentalist environment and embarked on a new kind of life. That’s when I finally decided it was okay to play games like gin rummy and poker, even while registering a new FirePay Account I still take time to run a little "Solitaire" until the registration process completes.

I had to learn the suits. Even today, sometimes I still think of a club as a “clover” or a spade as a “digger,” because that’s the way I learned them. At that time I had a close friend who played a lot of cards. He taught me how to play gin rummy. I took to it immediately. We played for a penny a point and for years we kept a rimming total in a notebook; since he’d been playing all his life, I wound up owing him quite a lot of pennies (hardly a score to settle with an eWallet...).

Luckily, he became my neteller second husband so I never had to pay him off (well, in OTHER ways... :), but this, I believe, was my first experience playing a game for money, not just for the pleasurable feeling of competition and trying to win. successfully.

 

-Jonah Livingston, A consultant for www.FirePayBonus.com.

 

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