“Umm . . . Aren’t you getting a little ahead of yourself, Aahz?” Tananda interrupted.
“How so?”
“Don’t you think it would be nice if we taught him the sequence of hands first? It’s a lot easier to bet when you know whether or not your hand is any good.”
“Oh. Yeah. Of course.”
“Let me handle this part, Aahz,” the troll volunteered. “Now then, Skeeve. The ascending sequence of hands is as follows:
High Card
One Pair
Two Pair
Three Of A Kind
Three Pair
Full House (Three Of A Kind plus a Pair)
Four Of A Kind
Flush
Straight (those last two are ranked higher and reversed because of the sixth card)
Full Belly (two sets of Three Of A Kind)
Full Dragon (Four Of a Kind plus a Pair)
Straight Flush
Have you got that?”
Half an hour later, I could almost get through the list without referring to my crib sheet. By that time, my teachers’ enthusiasm was noticeably dimmed. I decided to push on to the next lesson before I lost them completely.
“Close enough,” I declared. “I can bone up on these on my own time. Where do we go from here? How much should I bet on the hands?”
“Not so fast,” Aahz said. “First, you’ve got to finish learning about the hands,”
“You mean there are more? I thought…”
“No. You’ve got all the hands … or will have, with a little practice. Now you’ve got to learn about conditional modifiers.”
“Conditional modifiers?” I echoed weakly.
“Sure. Without ‘em, dragon poker would be just another straightforward game. Are you starting to see why I didn’t want to take the time before to teach you?”
I nodded silently, staring at my list of card hands that I somehow had a feeling was about to become more complex.