Halloween, Dart and Poker Games

Published in the Olathe News in November 2007

Halloween, Dart, and Poker Games
By Leonard Hall

Halloween, dart tournament, and poker tournaments are popular activities for deaf people in October and November.

Halloween was a popular as Olathe Club of the Deaf (OCD) and Wichita Association of the Deaf each had a lot of children and deaf adults coming to their annual Halloween party last Saturday. Kansas School for the Deaf had several Halloween parties for its students.

It is great to watch people wearing creative costumes at these parties. The children were better than adults at creating wild costumes to wear.

Another popular event is the dart leagues, which dozens of deaf players played dart at OCD every week.
This Saturday, OCD will have its 5th annual dart tournament that will attract many deaf players from throughout the Kansas City area. The tournament with several different events will last from noon to midnight.

Another popular activity is playing poker games. Many deaf people, including myself, would watch those poker tournaments and poker lesson programs on cable television when there is nothing else to watch.

At a local bar on one Sunday night, I attended a poker tournament packed with many hearing poker players and a few deaf players.

During the tournament, deaf people would sign to each other giving tips on playing poker while playing their cards. It was a learning process for me as I never played in a poker tournament before.

Throughout the night, nearly all of the deaf poker players were winning. Hearing players would cursed quietly and were amazed at the deaf players beating them.

In the championship round, 2 out of the 6 final players were deaf. The winner of the poker tournament was a young deaf female visiting Olathe from California.

She played showing no emotion throughout the night. No-one could figure if she was bluffing or not.

She was good at figuring out the other hearing players’ style of playing. She would tell us in sign language how the other hearing person is bluffing.

When I asked several local deaf players how they did in local poker tournaments, they won several poker tournaments winning prizes of $100 to $500 over the past year.

Several local deaf players would play regularly in several national deaf poker tournaments held on the coasts and would often finished in the top 10 out of hundreds of players.

At a regional deaf conference, I had a chance to play one night in my first poker tournament with 24 deaf players from throughout the Midwest. After 3 hours of playing pokers, I took 2nd place to the deaf chef.
(Leonard Hall writes a weekly column on the deaf community and can be reached at Legalnetwk@aol.com.)