Between the Sheets

When my family gets together, the boys challenge each other to feats of skill that test our bravery and intelligence.  It involves calculating odds and predicting one another's actions.  Only the most daring, and at times luckiest of us, may claim victory.  We all take turns winning and losing, except for Joshua who only wins.  We keep score with money.  People call this contest poker.  We play with a $.50 bet limit, so it takes a while to win or lose any money.

Some times we will take a break from poker to do some gambling.  Gambling is betting on something that is completely out of your control.  As opposed to poker which is a skill game.  This weekend we played a game called between the sheets or tweener.  Two cards are dealt face up.

The player then chooses to bet if the next card will be between those two cards.  If he likes his odds, he will bet as much as he wants, up to the amount in the pot.

When the third card is between the two cards, the bettor takes the amount that he bet out of the pot.

When the card is outside of the other two, the bettor pays what he bet.

If the card is the same as the one of the others, he has to pay double his bet.

If the bettor does not like the spread, he can decline to bet and play moves on to the next bettor.  Being able to count cards does help in this game.  But it is mostly just luck of the draw.  Hopefully some day, I will remember that I have bad luck.  On six bets in a row Saturday, I had to double my bet.  Thankfully they were mostly small bets, but one of them was $6 after the double.  For the weekend I finished down $7.47, most of that was while playing tweener.

I should have learned my lesson the first time that I ever played it.  On my first Sandlin fishing trip, I lost $12 for the week, but $20 of that was on two bets of tweener.  I doubled a $5 bet, then tried to win that $10 back on the next bet.  This is why I rarely bet on anything that is out of my control.