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Poker Stories: Pageaux’s poker history

April 23, 2019

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Have you met Patrick, also known as Pageaux? If you’ve written into support, popped into our forum, or inquired about our volunteer team, his name might look familiar. As a Community Coordinator who leads our volunteer team, Patrick has plenty to keep him busy here at Replay Poker. Learn more about how he got his start in the game.

“I learned poker as a family game. Growing up in Central Texas, we had an abnormally large and close family. Literally. Close. Just one side of my family makes up around 90 people and almost all of them lived within a two-hour drive of our house. With two older brothers and plenty of cousins around, there was always some type of competition going on. The main event though was each summer when all of us would camp out in Meridian State Park for five days and nights of nonstop games.

Each generation in my family has their own unofficial game and mastering each one helps to hone important skills. During the day, the grandparents would set up card tables in the shade and you could get a master class in bidding and seat positions by taking up a game of Texas 42. After dinner, it was all about counting cards and reading the table as our aunts and uncles would begin teaming up and challenging us to what became decade-long rivalries in Spades. This was all a preamble, though, to when us kids were left to play Texas Hold’em.

Everyone knew the preeminent game was going to take place at night after we were all sent to bed. We’d have to sneak out of our cabins and make our way to the featured table — the older kids tent. No convincing was needed for this as everyone had their eyes set on the ultimate prize: Starburst.

In the week prior to camp, the oldest kids from each family had been working to get their hands on the large Halloween sized bags of Starburst. Here’s where they would be unveiled. Legends of the game could be seen in the tent. Everyone from my two older brothers to my cousin, ‘Too Tall’ David, used this as their primary venue. Once we’d packed the tent, the Starburst were divvied up and assigned their familiar values, with Pink and Red obviously being worth the most. It was during these nights when I truly fell in love with the game and learned my final lessons of the day. Don’t eat your small blind and don’t even trust your family when it comes to poker and Starburst.

My love of the game continued into high school, when not long after changing schools, I started playing at a local coffee shop with some friends I’d recently made. The coffee shop couldn’t officially run a live game so we played free poker mainly for bragging rights and the occasional side bet. I remember my first game there vividly for two reasons. One, I felt it polite to buy the $6 coffee, but thought it was a high price to pay for a free game (I could have bought a lot of Starburst for that). Two, I had come that night with a cute redhead that I and everyone else at the table soon realized was really good at poker. I was on her left that night as she took all of our chips. She was on my left eight years later when we got married.

A few all-too-quick years later, I had graduated from Texas Tech and found myself in Houston working for a gaming technology company that was in charge of running a game that dealt in pure chance: the Texas Lottery. I learned more than I ever thought I would need to know about odds and the importance of picking out only the luckiest of pennies. From there I hit the jackpot and landed a gig in a different type of gaming that was all skill: video games. I was fortunate enough to help support and see a community grow around three different video games we released on all of the major platforms.

Finally, after all this I was offered an opportunity to return home to a game of both luck and skill: Texas Hold’em. I jumped at the chance to join this amazing team as a Community Coordinator and Head of Volunteers here at Replay Poker.”

Now that you know a bit about Pageaux’s background, stay tuned for an upcoming blog post from him that’s all about volunteers — what they do, and why they’re so important to us here at Replay.