Two narrative chapters from my forthcoming book about Oh Hell

07 Jan, 2026

These are related to tips to improve your neighborhood card game. The first is a narrative about hosting. Then below it is a narrative about finding new players.

Prosciutto

It’s such a rookie move to put out all the prosciutto for CITA.

CITA. That’s Cards In The Air. The time the game actually starts. This isn’t some poker cash game, where people arrive when they arrive and you start as soon as three people are there, or two if they really want to gamble. This is a card game. A real card game. There’s a difference. Like my dad always said, poker’s not a card game, it’s a gambling game played with cards.

And one thing about card games is that you need a CITA, because the game can’t start till everyone is there. Well, that’s not exactly right. It’s just a pain in the ass to add somewhere after you start, and infuriating to be waiting around for Johny Late Guy to nonchalantly walk in 23 minutes after everyone else was ready. So the last line of the communication has to be what time doors open and what time is CITA. Doors 8:15, CITA 8:45. You wouldn’t believe how many of these clowns only mention a single time in their emails. Absurd.

Anway, you don’t put all the prosciutto out for CITA. You hold a little back in a second stash. Bagley has a name for it that he loves semi-ironically mentioning—the reserve prosciutto—because he’s funny, clever, and Bagley, but it’s more a concept than a thing. The feeding frenzy always slows down when stuff starts to dwindle; nobody wants to eat the last bite. So you hold some snacks in reserve and bring them out after the lull.

And look, no matter how good your snack spread is, the prosciutto is going first. I mean, hook these gorillas up to the feed bag and you’re getting cleaned out in any case, but the shaved meats are always top choice. In some ways it’s self-fulfilling; as soon as people believe it’s going fast, they aim their guns at it right away. Tragedy of the commons and all that. The game theory of the snack spread isn’t lost on these guys.

But right now, the prosciutto is the least of my worries. It’s 8:14 and I’m standing in New Kevin’s kitchen—it’s his first time hosting and he asked if I’d come help him setup—and things are looking pretty grim. Like do-we-have-two-decks-of-cards grim.

I brought the bidding chips and an iPad for scoring and a couple Bust Bells. But like, step zero is a reasonable table and six chairs and two decks of cards and right now we don’t even have that.

“What about this? Will this work?” I walk toward the sound of New Kevin’s voice, into a formal dining room just off the kitchen. “This will definitely seat everyone.”

I turn the corner and survey the scene. It is not going to work. I mean, yes, it will work. You can play Oh Hell on the grass out in the yard with homemade cards at night while it’s raining. The problem is that this would only be a notch or two better than that. The whole thing is wrong. For starters the table is like 8 feet long and probably more than 4 feet wide. It looks like it’s seaworthy.

”It’s going to be really annoying to gather tricks from all the way across this table.” I can see that New Kevin is considering this issue—which is far and away the key issue in table selection—for the first time. “We definitely would prefer a table that’s too small to one that’s too big. Do you have a couple of bridge tables?”

Most of the club disagrees with me, but I’m a firm believer that a sturdy bridge table is the ideal setup for a 4-player game—and two pushed together is a solid in-a-pinch solution for six. Not as good as a round table, but surely better than this boat.

“I don’t think so.” New Kevin is racking his brain. “What do you mean by ‘bridge table? Are the those the collapsible square tables?’”

I should have thrown a couple bridge tables in the trunk. Bad read.

”Well, if it’s this or the kitchen island, I think we go with the kitchen.” It’ll be annoying playing on granite, and Dennis is going to be grouchy sitting on stools, but it’s all we’ve got that’s counter height. And these straight back dining room chairs look brutal, anyway.

Part of me can’t wait to see Bagley’s reaction to this debacle. Bagley gets it. And his millennial sense of irony is perfect for this sort of hosting nonsense. I’ll run into him on the street or whatever tomorrow and he’ll just deadpan “Well that was a subpar gaming experience last night.” And I’ll just laugh.

Right now, the hosting duties generally rotate between me, Geoffrey, and Bagley. Nobody else volunteers much—Randy on occasion, but less and less these days—and all three of us enjoy the hosting. Well, Bagley and I enjoy it. I think Geoffrey does it out of a sense of obligation. But he likes it well enough too.

We all have similar setups. Finished basements with round tables and wet bars and big screen TVs. It’s unclear who’s setup is best. Bagley and I both have gorgeous handcrafted tables—he’s an expert woodworker, and one of his hobbies is building ultra high-end poker tables, I apprenticed him on the building of mine—but Geoffrey brews beer and always has a couple on tap. Bagley has the best sound system. Geoffrey and I have dartboards. I do cocktails, not just bourbon.

But I don’t think there’s any question that Bagley does the best spread. He is a thousand percent dedicated to a top flight loser’s lounge. I mean, he’ll put out the tray of olives and nuts. And like four different dips. And a cookie tray. Plus all the usual stuff.

It’s definitely not cheap to host well—Costco helps, there’s a 1-pound prosciutto there that’s like $8 and a huge Brie wheel that’s like $7—but obviously it helps if you are a winning player. I just assume every penny is getting plowed back into hosting.

And it always makes me laugh to think of the time we were wrapping up a game at Randy’s—me and him and Chaney and Bagley just shooting the shit after the match ended—and Randy says something like ‘Jesus, I almost lost as much on the cards as I did on the food tonight!’

And that stunned me because Randy had lost like $75 on the cards—and that’s a serious debacle in these $1/point matches—but I thought the snack spread was totally pedestrian. Like, a big bag of SunChips and a summer sausage and prosciutto and some crackers.

Evidently Chaney was thinking the same thing.

“Where the fuck are you shopping?” He could barely spit it out he was laughing so hard. “Didn’t you lose like $70 tonight?”

And now poor Randy is getting trashed talked about his game and his spread and it’s 1:15am on a Tuesday and we’re standing on his screened-in porch and all I can think about is how hard it would be to fall asleep if I dumped $150 into a game and got laughed at for it and still had to clean everything up.

Look. The problem with most home games is they are terrible. And not because the game itself is terrible—though that’s also true a lot of the time—but because the host has no idea how to actually host a card game, and the club has no norms of good hosting. And there’s nothing wrong with see-what’s-in-the-garage-fridge and let-me-see-what-chips-we-have hosting, but it’s not how you build a club and not how you sustain a game.

When a noob shows up and sees a full spread on the counter and a place to mix real cocktails with four different bourbons and bidding chips stacked neatly on the table and a scoreboard waiting on the TV, it just projects a level of class and gives off an unmistakable aura of seriousness.

But what the host needs to do for a card game is make people enjoy themselves, regardless of whether they win or lose, and regardless of whether they are winning or losing players. And some people just don’t have it. Chaney. Dennis. Those guys are fucking cardplayers and trash talkers and spite-bust-grandma competitive. And they appreciate classy hosting. But it’s not something they’re looking to provide. Too much of an impediment to playing well.

And look, plenty of good players are also good hosts. But it’s definitely not a prerequisite. I mean, Rob V doesn’t have a clue at a competitive Oh Hell table. Just totally hopeless. Can’t bid, can’t play. Only dangerous because he makes all your reads totally unreliable. He’ll have his tricks and then show up with three more trumps and you’ll bust too. And he’ll just shrug and laugh and say “Sorry, I really botched that one, huh?”

But that dude gets it. Grew up in that western New York kitchen-table card game culture and you can feel it as soon as he walks in, usually with a bottle in hand he’s gifting the host and always with six stories he can’t wait to tell—he’ll be the goat in most of them—plus all the gossip from the Moose Lodge.

And he’s going to lose money but you’ll never know it from talking to him, because he’s one of those guys who gets more gregarious when he’s losing. Fuck me if I could ever figure out how to do that. And he’s not an uncompetitive guy! I mean, he definitely wants to win. But it’s just totally orthogonal to why he showed up.

Anyway, one week Rob V let us know he wanted to host the next game. We jumped on it immediately, and he didn’t disappoint. Called me four days beforehand to review the supply checklist and discuss available tables in his house.

Then we show up and his kitchen looks like an Italian deli and smells like a bakery. Meats. Desserts. Wood-fired Pizza. Bagley was on a business trip and was legit pissed when I texted him the photos.

Rob got completely smoked at the table. He couldn’t have cared less. No one did. The only thing anyone remembered was that spread.

Hand to god, he got a friend to bartend the game. Craft cocktails. Served at the table. At a fucking Oh Hell match. It was incredible.

Fresh Blood

“Oh, I forgot to tell you—I gotta guy for you to add to the list.” Jim is here on the early side—he’s more a Doors Open type than a CITA guy—and we’re lazily throwing darts while we wait for the others. He pulls out his phone to text me the contact. “Guy I work with, says he knows Spades.”

New players are great, and we’re always actively looking. We’d love to grow the club. We had 8 total at the club championship two years ago, made a big push and got to 12 last year. The holy grail of a 16-player, four-table, bridge-style team duplicate seems vaguely within reach. Someday. And every new potential regular gets us closer to that.

But I’m not getting my hopes up. For every new regular we end up with, we probably get half a dozen people trying it out.

The skill-curve has become intimidating. Even guys who played with their family growing up—even the ones who become great additions to the club, like Ed—tend to struggle in our games initially.

I remember when Dennis first brought Jim to a game—he knew trump games and had even played Oh Hell with his grandparents growing up in Kansas City. “That was intense” was the after-action report we got via Dennis.

Which surprised me at first, because I think of us as talking trash and laughing our asses off. But you forget that 98% of card games aren’t played as serious competitive endeavors. So I guess everything’s relative.

It’s even worse for people who like card games—maybe they played Spades or Euchre—but don’t know Oh Hell. And total beginners—like what’s a trump?—are more often than not completely overwhelmed by the jargon and the pace of the action. I’m pretty sure it costs us a lot of people who might otherwise become regulars.

“Think he’s a potential regular?” I pull the darts out of the board and hand them off.

”He definitely seemed excited when I told him about the game.” Jim lines up his throw. “But who knows.” He throws a dart. “At least he’s familiar with trump games. Not just a poker player.”

Seriously. The poker guys are the worst. Really low-percentage yield. And that’s after you get past the vast majority of them who won’t even try it. Poker being more gambling than cardplaying. I never fully internalized that until I tried recruiting poker players to Oh Hell.

On the surface, they look like the perfect fit. They know Home Games and inside jokes. They’re used to gambling on cards. They’re fine staying out till 1am on a weeknight.

At first glance, you might even mistake an Oh Hell match for a poker game. Tables. Chairs. Cards. Chips. Beer. Snacks. Music. Laughter. Winners. Losers. Cash. The trappings are close to identical.

Nine times out of ten, it doesn’t work.

The game itself is just fundamentally different. Incredibly, one thing the poker players hate about Oh Hell is the very thing that makes it so great—the lack of downtime. Poker players constantly complain about being card dead or bored or whatever, but deep down they don’t want to be thinking all the time. It’s hard work.

And it’s also a totally different form of thinking. Especially for recreational poker players. Expert poker players have a lot to think about, but your typical home game player really doesn’t. Good hand? Bet or call or raise. Bad hand? Fold. There just aren’t that many decisions.

And then you’re telling them about managing four different suits and exiting in trumps and remember hearts have been led twice and it all just sounds exhausting. The beauty of the card play in a trump game—like putting someone in with a trump to end play them—is completely lost on them. As is the prospect of ever playing cards for no money.

And no-limit hold’em poker culture has made it worse. They’re all addicted to the huge confrontations that swing all the money on one hand. Trying to rack up Oh Hell points worth $1 a pop? It’s just boring. Like Dad said, they’re here primarily for the gambling, not the card game.

And they are so lazy at the table. At least the old Stud players had to watch the cards and remember what was folded. Try telling a hold’em player that a key Oh Hell skill is remembering the past tricks. That just sounds like a total grind to them.

Now look, I love poker. I play regularly and host games and try to get out to Vegas for the WSOP every year for a week of tournaments. And all of the regulars in our club play poker too. But in the end, you’re either a poker player or a cardplayer. You can’t really be both.

And all of us are cardplayers.

“Where’d he grow up?” I take my place on the line as Jim pulls the darts out of the board.

“Not sure.” Jim hands me the darts “Maybe Michigan? Definitely undergrad at Notre Dame.”

That’s a good sign. It sounds insane, but we have way better luck with people from the cultural greater Midwest. Think everything from Iowa and the Dakotas straight across all the way through Upstate New York and into New England. Call it the Bust Belt.

The pop sociology isn’t rocket science. It’s cold as fuck, eight months of year there’s nothing to do, twelve months a year there’s almost nothing to do, and everyone has a pleasant memory of learning Spades or Euchre and playing with their uncles at Christmas.

Like, if they have a favorite college hockey team, the odds they stick around skyrocket..

I mean, I’m from Upstate, Dennis is from north central PA, Rob V is from Buffalo, Jim’s from Missouri, Ed’s from Ohio, Doug’s from here but his mom’s family is from Upstate. Most of the other guys are from around here in NoVA, but they all learned the game as adults. We all grew up on it. Card game culture. Oh Hell natives, so-to speak.

“Great. I’ll get him on the noob list and send him a personal email. I’ll CC you.” I pull the darts out of the board and put them away. It’s time to turn the scoreboard on. “Hopefully, we don’t scare him off like Ashwin.”

That’s the other problem we’re having. We’re scaring off a lot of good candidates with our organizational seriousness. I mean, I tell every noob right out of the gate that we’ve got guys who play every week and guys who play twice a year and all that is totally fine—and it is—but then they come to a game and they’ve never seen a real snack setup or a digital scoreboard mirrored to a TV, or just the mechanics of a well-run, classy game. And they’re like ‘whoa, maybe this isn’t for me.’

And it’s so fucking stupid because, well, first of all, it’s still just a bunch of dudes playing cards in a basement for quarters. Fart jokes and all. If you turn the lights up and really look at it, it’s no different than the horribly-run home poker games or board game nights these guys are used to.

But, more importantly, it’s exactly what every home game card player has dreamed about their whole life: a game that’s actually run well and has a level of sophistication to it, but still allows for the Card Night antics many people find charming.

But they’re gone before they are comfortable.

All of the regulars who didn’t have a family Oh Hell background—Chaney, Bagley, Geoffrey, Randy—didn’t come to the game cold. They were either friends who played in our couples’ card nights, guys from my old poker game, or both. What they all have in common is that, after a while, they figured out they were cardplayers, not poker players.

It took maybe four or five years and it was a gradual transition. Oh Hell had come to be the dominant game at our occasional couples’ card nights. Then we started playing for money occasionally instead of playing poker. Then it moved to its own night. Then during the pandemic, the poker game fell apart, but the Oh Hell game moved online to BGA.

I was sad when that poker game died—it had gone 10 years—but I’m a cardplayer too, and I’d way rather be playing Oh Hell.

You can tell pretty quickly if a guy’s gonna make it. Like we tried with Bob Stein. He’s a decent poker player and he thinks about it analytically and so we gave it a shot. I knew by the second hour he wasn’t coming back. Totally baffled by the concept of tricks and trumps and bidding. Couldn’t stand that he had to show his cards to the prowlers. No appreciation for the specific brand of trash. I’ve rarely seen someone so out of their element.

And I always think about the first time we played with Dennis. It was at Geoffrey’s and we found Dennis because his daughter was on the same second-grade soccer team as mine. And he bid a zero in the five-round and someone led a small heart and then next player trumped it and Dennis played the ♥︎K and Geoffrey said ‘oooh, lucky’ and Dennis immediately said ‘Settle down, it was guarded. I’m not letting you monkeys get me that easy’ and we like barely knew this guy.

But we knew enough.

#Oh Hell #cards