The craze of playing poker has swept the nation. Our neighbors love to play cards and we get together often to have a few drinks and snacks and to play cards. It seems as soon as my neighbor starts losing at a particular game we have to learn another one. His latest game that he wanted to teach us is 3 card poker. I have had trouble learning how to place bets with other poker games, but he assured me that this is one of the easiest pokers to learn how to play. Considering we play for chips and not money I was game to try something new.

My neighbor's wife is like I am when it comes to playing cards. Holding the cards in our hands is an excuse to get together and visit. I do not care if we play 3 card poker or crazy 8's, I like getting together for drinks, food and gossip. The neighbor said all we needed to play 3 card poker was a standard deck of fifty two playing cards. He said that 3 card poker involves two different games that are played at the same time. I thought this sounded complicated, but he assured me that one of the games takes no skill at all, the dealers hand is immaterial and there is no discarding.

My husband had never played 3 card poker before either. We teased my neighbor that he only wanted to play 3 card poker to increase his own chances of winning, being he was playing with three people who had never heard of the game before. He said the game had been around a long time and was also called tri-card poker. None of us had heard of tri-card poker either.

We started playing and at first it seemed that there had to be something missing because it was so easy to learn. By the third round we all had the hang of playing 3 card poker and my neighbor's wife was building up quite a pile of chips. After playing for 45 minutes our neighbor decided that we should play something other than 3 card poker. His reason was that he thought it was too simple of a game to be playing. The real reason was that his wife had nearly everyone of his chips! We decided to play one of our other favorite games, but I am sure that in the future we will try 3 card poker again because it really was fun and easy to play.