I am a degenerate poker play. I can admit it. While there are those that would apologize for being as wrapped in poker as I am. I will not. I love it. I should be getting Tax returns ready but instead I’m on stars… Cheeky MTT anyone?

Poker is not a sport. It is a culture and as such has developed it’s own language. Earlier I wrote about hand names, and a list of poker terms, the list is massive but recently I was curious about the origins of the term donkey in poker, so I Googled it and found this claim at About.com:

Definition: If a poker player is called a ‘donkey,’ he’s a bad player who makes blatantly bad poker plays. A weak player.

Donkey is also shortened to “donk” by many players to announce that they’re playing badly or planning to, as in “I’m going to donk it up tonight.” A tournament full of poor poker players is called a donkament.

A Zonkey is a whole new bread of Donkey – Cross between a Zebra and a Donkey – They are usually younger players that hang around or watch good player, pick up some terms and flashy moves then without any real understanding of poker flash it up at a table. They often berate players for being Donkeys just before they 4 bet their stack into a rock.

Also Known As: fish, pigeons.

This I disagree on.  Donkey is a broad negative description that is applied to anyone who plays poorly, but more often than not bad beats people. A fish is usually applied to a losing player. Donkey = bad as they river you, Fish = good as they pay you off… I’ve never heard the term pigeon, no doubt some northern English colloquial stuff there.

On to a couple of other poker terms…

Shark: The most obvious is shark, a very strong player. Clearly, sharks are notoriously vicious, top-of-the-food-chain predators.

Fish: The term fish may have been derived from shark, since fish are largely helpless, bottom-of-the-food-chain prey. It’s a nice bit of structuralist lexicon building, if that is the case.

The Nuts: This terms refers to the best possible hand. I found the following story about its origin here (I have no way of verifying its veracity):

This cool poker term dates way back to the Wild West where cowboys would gather round a table, preferably in a saloon but alternatively around a campfire, and play cards. Back then poker players would not always bet with cash or chips. It was a more rustic time, and men would often bet their horse and wagon on a poker hand. Legend has it that when a cowboy bet his wagon he would unscrew the nuts from his wagon wheels and place them in the pot. The reason behind this gesture was that in the event that he lost the pot he could not leap up, hop into his wagon and ride away with his wager. The fact that he was willing to put those nuts in the pot as surety for the strength of his hand resonated through the prairie, and came to be synonymous with the best hand. A cowboy would only bet “the nuts” when he was convinced that his hand was the best out there. (emphasis added)

BHS