Poker mania has practically swept over the nation. Our neighbors love to play cards and we get together often to have a few drinks and snacks and to play cards. My neighbor's wife has an attitude similar to mine when it comes to playing cards. A card game provides a convenient excuse to meet up. I do not mind whether we play 3 card poker or crazy 8's, I am there for the drinks, good food and gossip.

It seems every time my neighbor starts losing at a particular game we have to start learning another one. The latest game that he persuaded us to try is 3 card pokers. I have encountered difficulty in learning how to place bets with other poker games, but he kept telling me that this is one of the easiest pokers ever. The neighbor said all the equipment we needed to play 3 card pokers was a standard deck of fifty two playing cards. He said that 3 card pokers involve two different games that are played simultaneously. I thought this sounded pretty complex, but he assured me that one of the games requires no particular skill at all, the dealers hand is immaterial and there is no discarding. It was like child's play, he said.

Well, considering that losers merely give up potato chips and not money I was thrilled to try something new. I was not alone. My husband had never played 3 card pokers before either. We teased my neighbor that he only wanted to play 3 card pokers to increase his own chances of winning in a game with three other people who had never heard of it before. He said the game had been around forever and was also called tri-card poker. Now, none of us had heard of tri-card poker either but it did not matter.

We started playing and at first it seemed that something must be amiss because it was extremely easy to learn. By the third round we all had mastered the 3 card poker and my neighbor's wife was accumulating almost a mountain of chips. After playing for 45 minutes our neighbor decided that we should switch games again. His reason was that he thought it was too simple of a game to be playing. The real reason, we suggested, was that his wife had most of the chips while he did not have any! We decided to return to one of our other favorite games, but I am sure that some time in the near future we will try 3 card poker again because playing it was really fun and easy. Don't you want to try?