Ranch Poker Guide Page 6: Bushwhacking

Bushwhacking

When the game of Guts was first imported to the Estrada Ranch around 1980, a new life form was spawned - the bushwhacker. The game, although at once elemental and stimulation, allows a person of limited intelligence and sensitivity, the opportunity to not only win a poker hand but to lure others into losing a poker hand, thereby increasing his depraved enjoyment many fold. This is the unfortunate by-produce of an otherwise perfect game. Simply, put, the whacker, not satisfied with merely collecting a nice pot, checks his bet with clear winners and then throws in with glee, in order to see someone suffer. Interesting or reprehensible? You be the judge.

The purpose of this chapter is no instructional. We don't need a table full of these types. I merely want the reader to be aware of the profile, the modus operandi, the early warning signs because these things mutate and spread. I've seen it happen.

He's been described as a diesel, squashing helpless rabbits in the road. I see him more like one of those big ugly fish that you see on a National Geographic special when they go down about two miles, onto the ocean floor and shine lights for the first time in history and there he is, back in a hole in the rocks, waiting. Because a bushwhacker will wait forever for that one sick moment of satisfaction. His desire is not winning money, that's just his excuse.

A bushwhacker is a bit like an evil genius - so full of promise at one time, but then something clicked in his perverted spider web of a mind and now the ordinary flow of cards, of winning and losing, no longer interests him. He needs blood.

The whacker has wide-set, beady eyes. His gait is clumsy, yet purposeful. He smokes, yet cautions others not to. He wakes at 9:00 am on opening weekend, borrows a gun, belt, pants, knife and kerchief, pukes at the flagpole and walks fifty feet down the road to shoot a deer that others have hunted out of the hills. You might recognize him.

To be honest, almost everyone has tried their hand at the bushwhack occasionally. But few have what it takes to sustain a career of it - a diseased mind. We need to keep a close watch on a few relative who are beginning to show some of the telltale signs and counsel them before it' s too late. Or maybe they'll just devour each other.