A player checks his cards during the finals of the Russian Masters Poker Cup.
Vladimir Konstantinov/Reuters
One of the most fun things about poker is the witty slang terms for different hands.
And with the 2016 World Series of Poker
getting underway in Las Vegas, we thought now was a good time to revisit some of our favorites:
Two Aces are usually called
Pocket Rockets
. But Star Wars enthusiasts call them
Admiral Ackbar
when a player holds the aces to trap
another player.
An Ace and King is usually called Big Slick
because it is a slippery hand with which one can easily lose a fortune. However, tennis fans sometimes call it the Anna Kournikova
because of the initials and because it “l
ooks good, but never wins
.”
Two Kings are almost always called Cowboys
.
An A-8 is usually called the Dead Man’s hand
because these were two of the cards Wild Bill Hickok was holding
when he was killed in 1876. It’s also
sometimes
called an Asterix and Obelix
— a reference to a series of French comics.
Two Queens can be called Canadian Aces
, referring
to The Queen of England’s relationship to Canada.
A Queen and Jack (QJ) can be called the Oedipus
, bandarq which is a reference
to Queen Jocasta and her son/husband Oedipus from the Greek tragedy.
Two Jacks are called Kid Dy-no-mite,
which was the signature phrase
of JJ from the show “Good Times.”
Two 9s are called the Wayne Gretzky
in honor of his jersey number.
Two 8s are called snowmen
— just because the numbers visually resemble them.
Two 4s are called the Midlife Crisis
.
And two 2s are called a Richard Nixon
because
of that famous photo
of him giving two peace signs off a helicopter.
[tiabirkbeck568]