Melissa Svanda: All In For Texas Hold’em vBy Aimee Huntley The pastime of card playing has been around thousands of years, long before binge watching Netflix to stave off winter boredom became the norm. Melissa Svanda of Tyndall, SD. regularly braves the cold and heads to Yankton for a good game of cards. Her preference, and that of many, is Texas Hold’em. Melissa was one of seven finalists from South Dakota that went to Las Vegas, Nevada to compete with others nationwide in February 2017 at the Stratosphere casino for a chance to win a place at the World Series of Poker Championship main event. As players prepare for a game, the air is abuzz with excitement. They all get their stacks of 3,000 dollars worth of chips and wait to be assigned their place at the tables. This is done by a random drawing at the beginning of each new game. Greetings and jokes are exchanged, and talk about recent games prevail. Texas Hold’em dates back to the early 1900’s and is a variation of the game Poker. The Texas Legislature cites Robstown, Texas as its birth place. The game remained in Texas, until it was brought to Las Vegas, NV in 1963 by Felton “Corky” McCorquodale. The game slowly became more popular and moved to the Golden Nugget Casino. It wasn’t until the World Series of Poker Main Event Tournaments became televised and books on the subject were written in the 1980’s that the game really took off. When a virtual unknown amateur; Chris Moneymaker won a seat through an online satellite event and won the whole 2003 tournament, complete with 2.5 million dollars, the world now knew that even a common Joe or Jill had the chance to play with the high rollars and win too. Now there are Free Poker Network Texas Hold’em leagues in thirteen of the fifty states, and the numbers of people dreaming of playing in the annual World Series of Poker main event are steadily growing. Texas Hold’em consists of a total of seven cards used per player each hand. The players are each dealt only two cards in the beginning called hole cards. These cards are kept secret from the rest of the people at the table in the beginning. The remaining five cards are dealt upright in sequence by the dealer. These are for all to use in conjunction with 16vHERVOICEvJANUARY/FEBRUARY 2019 their own pair. The goal of the round is to be the player with the five highest scoring cards or having the best hand overall. The conclusion of the game is the player that is the last person to have poker chips when everyone else has lost all of theirs. When everyone playing a round has to turn over their cards to see which is the winner, this is called a showdown. Some people will win rounds simply because they have bet so high everyone else has folded. In this instance you don’t necessarily need to have had the best hand at the table, everyone else just thought so! Yankton has held public Texas Hold’em games at local bars since 2008. They’ve played at Cheers, Rounding Third, the Landing, Happy Hourz, and will soon be at Mojo’s on Monday and Friday nights starting Jan. 7th. Dawn Williams volunteered to host the leagues, and has been going strong ever since. She actually learned how to play from her husband, Terry, who’s participated in the World Series of Poker main events 2015-2017. Once they married she wanted to have a league available in Yankton, so he wouldn’t have to travel to Lennox or Sioux Falls. There are currently two Yankton leagues that each meet regularly one night a week. It is free for people to play and local residents have qualified to play in regional, Dawn & Terry Williams state, and nationals tournaments. These also culminate with a chance for seats at the main event for the World Series of Poker which is usually held at the Rio Casino in Las Vegas ever summer. Melissa has always liked cards and enjoyed playing Black Jack and Caribbean Stud. She originally learned how to play Hold’em during a visit to Las Vegas and loved it ever since. She enjoys the challenge, the camaraderie, and the opportunities to play with others in tournaments all over the country. She sometimes practices with online games on her phone during her lunch break at Welfl Construction where she is employed as an administrative assistant. In visiting with some of Melissa’s fellow poker players, there appears to be as many philosophies about strategies as there are types of card games. Will Russaw, fondly nicknamed Moose, claims “I’d rather have a teaspoon of luck than a truckload of talent.” Other players come from the opposite perspective and are very deliberate in their decision to go “all in” and put all of their remaining chips in for a bet, or to throw in their cards and “fold”, which means to get out of that round. Melissa says she’s in the middle, “conservative but she’ll bet high if she has a good hand.” She’d rather play fewer hands and fold, than waste chips on bad plays. If you play with the same people regularly and pay attention, sometimes you can start to read them and have hunches about whether they have really good cards. Supposedly the best first two cards to be dealt is a pair of aces, and the worst, a seven and a two. A pair of the same cards especially if they are kings, queens, or jacks are usually pretty good also.