It had not been a good day. All things considered, Emma hadn’t really been all that difficult a customer, but she was far from the only person I’d had to deal with over the course of the afternoon. I’d been cursed out by a seventy year old grandmother for not giving her a senior discount (which we did not offer to anyone), and a young man had stumbled into the store at some point while clearly high on some particularly potent illicit substance. When I finally punched out I was more than ready to buy a beer and wind down at my usual haunt, O’Hale’s Irish Style Pub, which was located in what passed for a “downtown” in the nowhere backwater where I lived. I trudged up to the doors and pushed them open, ready to drown my frustrations in cheap drafts and fried potatoes.

Sean, the bartender of the establishment, saw me as I made my way to my usual stool. He and I were old friends. We could hardly be anything else, seeing as how I had been one of his regulars for years. I didn’t even need to place an order, the moment I walked in he was already making his way to the tap to pour me my usual brown ale.

“Bryson! Good to see you as always! How’d work go today?”

“Oh, you know,” I replied as I parked myself at the bar, “the usual.”

“That bad, huh?” he asked, setting my beer down in front of me on the wooden bar.

“Well, you know how it goes,” I took a sip, “People wear on you sometimes. Still, it wasn’t all bad. We had something of a celebrity come in today.”

“Really? Do tell.”

“It was this girl named Alva Lorensen. I don’t suppose you’ve heard of her? No? Well, I hadn’t either but apparently she’s some big poker hotshot. Ernie’s a huge fan.”

“Is that so?” Sean asked, “Did he freak out when she walked in?”

“You bet he did. He even tried to run up to her.”

Sean laughed. “Ernie? Running? I wish I had been there to see that.”

“It was a sight to behold. Speaking of which, that was the other thing about this Alva girl: She was absolutely breathtaking! Completely angelic! She has these blue eyes and this perfect hair… I don’t even know how to describe it. If I’ve ever seen a more beautiful woman in my life I sure as hell don’t remember it.”

“Why Bryson, you flatter me!” came a familiar crystal-clear voice from behind me.

I felt my face turn red with embarrassment, and turned around to see Alva herself standing right behind me, having just walked into the pub. She had been stunning before, even standing in a place with as little atmosphere to it as a mattress store, but now that I saw her in the pub with the wooden walls and floors and the slightly dimmed lighting it was almost hard to believe she was actually standing there rather than having been painted into the scene.

“I’m sorry, I…” I began.

“Don’t be.” she told me. “I’m not going to be angry because somebody says something nice about me.”

She walked up and sat down next to me, plopping her purse down on the bar.

“Whiskey and water, if you would be so kind.” She said to Sean.

“Coming right up!” Sean replied. Right before he walked over to the liquor shelf he shot me a look that said man, you weren’t kidding!

Sean began to pour the drink, and I looked over at Alva. I may have already embarrassed myself, but I refused to be intimidated into silence by the presence of this uncanny, ethereal woman. It was time to strike up a conversation.

“So… you play cards for a living?” I asked her, “How does that work? Are you just unusually lucky, or what?” I didn’t like how accusatory I sounded. None of the words that came out of my mouth in this woman’s company ever seemed to sound how I intended them.

“I’m pretty lucky I guess,” Alva agreed as Sean set a glass of whiskey and some water down in front of her, “But really you don’t need actually have a winning hand to take a pot if you know what you’re doing. You just need to convince the other players that you have a winning hand.” She poured a splash of water into the whiskey and took a sip.

“Oh, right, you’re talking about bluffing people. I’ve heard that’s a big thing, though I don’t really know that much about poker.”

“Do you at least know what the hierarchy of the hands you can have is?” she asked. “If you know that the rest falls into place pretty easily.”

“Not well.” I said. “The royal flush is the best hand, right?”

“That’s true,” she confirmed, “but really I prefer to think of it like this: a straight flush is the highest hand you can have, and the royal flush is just the highest straight flush that there is.”

“And a straight flush means you have five cards in a row, like five-six-seven-eight-nine, and they’re all in the same suit? Like all clubs or something?” I was pretty sure I knew how this worked.

“Precisely. Then under that is four of a kind, which is pretty self-explanatory. Next under that is a full house, which is a hand that has both three of a kind and a pair in it. Like three kings and two jacks, for example.”

“What’s next? I can never remember if it’s a flush or a straight.” I was feeling a little sheepish that my knowledge of the game wasn’t a little better.

“Flush is next. A flush beats a straight, but straight is the next best thing after a flush. Then it’s three of a kind, then two pair, then one pair, and finally high card, which is where you have pretty much nothing in your hand and you just take the highest card you’ve got.”

“And a high card basically never wins, right?”

“You’d be surprised” Alva told me, “It happens more often than you’d think. Sometimes two players are both waiting for something to happen on the turn or the river and neither one of them get there. In those cases a high card wins quite a lot of the time.”

“The turn? The river?” I was lost.

Alva smiled. “You know what? Maybe it’s better if I just show you.” She reached into her purse and pulled out a box of playing cards. “You know what Texas Hold’Em is, right?”

“I mean, I know it’s a poker variant, but I don’t actually know how it works.” I admitted.

“Okay, so this is the poker that we play in tournaments.” Alva expertly split, riffled, and bridged the cards, shuffling them in a clean motion with one of the most satisfying sounds I had ever heard in my life. It was almost as pleasant as her voice, though nothing could quite reach those lofty heights. “Instead of us each having our own unique hands we each share five cards in the middle and we have two cards of our own. Then we pick out the best five cards of the seven available to us. Hey mister bartender, want to play a hand?”

“I couldn’t miss out on this,” Sean said, “It’s always fun to see a master at work."

“I hate to disappoint you, but without a lot of money on the line this is going to be entirely about luck. Skill won’t really come into it if none of us have any reason to fold.” Alva corrected him apologetically, “This is just to demonstrate how a hand works. So the first thing we do is we all get two cards face-down…” Alva flicked the cards off the top of the deck, starting with me and then Sean and finally herself. Then she repeated the circle again so we each had two cards. “This is ‘the pre-flop’. If we were playing for money, this is where the first round of betting would happen.”

I looked at the cards I had been dealt. I had a jack of diamonds and a seven of clubs.

“Next, I burn a card,” Alva continued, placing one card face down and setting it aside on the bar. “That’s an old rule to help prevent cheating by stacking a card on top of the deck. After that, I lay three cards face up on the board.” She took three cards off the top of the deck and turned them over all at once, spreading them out on the bar. They were the seven of diamonds, the deuce of hearts, and the queen of hearts. I noticed that the seven on the board paired the seven that I had in my hand. “This is called ‘the flop’. After this there would be another round of betting, and then I burn another card and turn another card up.” She put another card face down, then added another face up card to the board: The eight of spades. “This fourth card on the board is called ‘the turn’. After that there’s more betting, and then I burn one final card and turn one final card face up. The fifth card is called ‘the river’” she repeated the process again, revealing the jack of hearts and pairing the jack in my hand. “After that we bet some more, and finally we reveal what we’ve got and see who won!”

We all turned our hands up. Sean had a king of hearts and an ace of clubs. It seemed like a great hand, but with no support from the board it was nothing more than an ace high. That being said, he had missed having a straight or a flush by only one card each. If a ten had shown up he would have won the hand. Another heart would have been even better. Alva turned up the queen of diamonds and the trey (which is what I would later learn was the term for the three) of clubs. She had paired the highest card on the board, but with my two pair of jacks over sevens I was the clear winner.

“Congratulations Bryson!” Alva cheered, “You’ve just won your first hand of poker!”

“Beginner’s luck,” Sean said, poking me lightly in the ribs.

I smiled. There was something exhilarating about winning even a purely luck-based hand over a woman who was supposedly one of the greatest in the world. I thought maybe I could learn to like this poker thing.