What Playing Poker in Amsterdam Taught Me About Making Friends

After I graduated from college, my friends and I got really into poker. Every Sunday night, we would meet at our buddy Joe’s apartment and play for a couple hundred bucks total. It was our weekly ritual. With the HBO show Entourage in the background, we’d order food and, huddled around a small table, catch up before getting ready to go to our boring post-college office jobs the following day.

Joe was the most enthusiastic of us all (to this day, he still plays professionally), and his passion for the game spilled over to me (though not his skills). While I was never a top-tier player, I loved the challenge it provided, and trying to figure out the probability of the cards and how to read people’s tells. I read books on poker and did everything I could to get better. Poker was — and still is — an intellectual challenge to me.

On the US road trip that started my round-the-world adventure in 2006, I stopped frequently at casinos to play — and won enough to pay for a lot of my trip.

Eventually, when I arrived in Amsterdam later that year, I grew bored of the constant weed smoking that was so prominent among my fellow travelers. As much as I loved getting high, I wasn’t traveling to sit in coffee shops all day and get baked. There was a whole city out there to see and explore.

So (slightly stoned) I would often embark on long solitary walks around town. (To this day, I walked more during that visit than I did in all my subsequent ones.)

One day, I passed a casino. I didn’t even know there was a casino.

“I wonder if they play poker here,” I said to myself. Though I was on a traveler’s budget and hadn’t played in months, I thought it might be fun to indulge a little bit in a foreign country.

I sat down at a full table of locals playing 2-5 No Limit (that means the first bets are 2 and 5 EUR). The stakes were higher than I wanted, but that was all that was available, so I bought in for the minimum.

When I finally decided to join a hand, the dealer said something to me in Dutch. “I’m sorry, can you repeat that in English?” I asked.

I had outed myself as a foreigner — and this created a lot of curiosity among the other players. I was young and clearly a backpacker, and they wanted to know how I ended up at the poker table and not in the coffee shops, where the other tourists seemed to go.

So I told them: Smoking endless amounts of pot had lost its luster, and so I was wandering each day, exploring the districts and…