Fat Possums Come out After Midnight

Don Daniels read every page in the newspaper front to back every day. At least he tried to. But he never would start with the next day when he didn't finish. He would always pick up where he left off so he was alway falling a little bit farther behind. I met him in Saint Louis playing $20-40 Hold'em. He had emphysema, but when it was put to a vote he voted to keep smoking in the casinos because he thought it was good for the game. He didn't want to wait while players took cigarette breaks.

I never saw Don upset at the table. Many players would beat him with poor starting hands or bad draws and almost everyone would be compelled to apologize. Don would always reply, "Don't be sorry," and smile. He always had a sharp soft-spoken remark that drifted by most people, but was often hilarious if you caught it. One comment he said a few times, which I didn't get at first, was this - fat possums come out after midnight.

I was reading books, trying to learn Hold'em and after work I'd drive to the Admiral, a boat parked on the Mississippi River and I'd play poker all night. Don was almost always there, sitting at an empty table reading a paper, waiting for a game to start.

He greeted everybody. He really liked to play poker. Early in the evening the games were tight. Players who had lost recently were determined to play better and win. But towards the end of the night a few players would start to wear down, take bad beats. Sometimes it happened slowly. They started playing too many hands. They got tired. Strange things would happen with the cards. It was inevitable because more things were happening because more people were playing more hands so strange things were bound to happen. Huge pots, gut shots, huge hands getting beat.

In the middle of the night people would make more and more mistakes. The drinks would start coming. One of the drunks would play every hand. One lady could never fold and called everybody, even though she was a psychic by trade and the inevitable "you didn't know what I had?" joke fell on her tired ears a million times. Around midnight the people who were losing started figuring out they were lonely, depressed, old, alone, whatever - and most of them let it affect how they played. How could they not?

Don Daniels was one of the few people I played poker with regularly that I never saw go on tilt. I figured out what he meant by fat possums come out after midnight, but it was a long time after I left Saint Louis before I did.

Now for some reason I was just wondering if he ever caught up to the present reading all those newspapers.