When we were kids, we used to play a lot of Poker in our house, then later in the “Roost.” We usually played for matchsticks, unless at the rare times we sneaked our dad’s poker chips to use. The rare “playing with real poker chips” times made our games extra special! In addition, it really impressed our same-age pals who played with us too! It never occurred to us that we could have saved up our meager money and bought a set of “real” poker chips in any “Dime Store”. However, even if we did think about it, we figured we’d probably need a “note from our parents” to buy “grown-up stuff” like this anyway. It seemed like anything we wanted to do or buy when we were kids that we were always told by our parents that you had to be “21” to buy those kinds of things! We ALWAYS played regular 5-card draw poker with various cards “wild.” Usually the “wildcards” were deuces and treys. Later on, we got a lot of “kibitzing” advice from our dad and Uncle Ned about such “wildcards” as “one-eyed Jacks,” all “mustached Kings”, and “Jokers”, etc. Later on, we started to add those “wildcards” to the deuces and treys. It seemed that most winning hands then consisted of nothing lower than a “full house”! We even had a more than average “Royal Flush” winning hands! However, this supposedly “best winning hand of all” paled in comparison to the “winningest hand of all,” the ultimate in winning hands! This, of course, was the legendary “5 ACES”!!!!! Many times, we had so many “wildcards” in the game that even “5 ACES” were occurring on practically EVERY deal, and sometimes in 2 or ALL hands! Since by now just about EVERY card was wild, it seemed, we had to determine the winning “same deal” hands with the ranking of the “wildcards”! If you both (or more) had Jacks counting for “5 ACES”, you better hoped that at least one of your Jacks had one eye since the ones with 20/20 in BOTH eyes were lower than the “one-eyed” ones! Hmmmm, looking back on all of this, I suspect that all those “wildcards” somehow “defeated the purpose” of Poker in the first place! Since Tim has ALWAYS been a much better card player than me, I rarely “played cards for money” later on in the Navy. Probably the main reason was that the first time I was invited to play “Poker for money” in one Navy barracks I was living in, the FIRST thing I asked after sitting down was, “What cards are wild”? After quickly reading their “body language” by their upturned eyeballs as they looked at each other, I quickly “remembered that I had an appointment to be else where right at that time”! From then on, I just played Spades and Euchre “for fun” with the guys that were “conservative” in lifestyle like I was!