This set was a long time in the making.
Inlay & concept:
I’ve shared the origin story of the inlay, completed a while ago. I really prefer vintage style chips and asked myself a “what if?” What if poker wasn’t outlawed in Mexico. What if the place where I discovered poker had not only been completed, but erected long ago, after the continued success of
Jack Dempsey’s place in Ensenada? Thus J. Finney’s was born.
Colors:
It took time to get the colors right as I wanted to each color to be meaningful and represent a key moment in my poker like.
25¢: Green spider plant in an orange pot. After a 10 year hiatus, I really got back into poker after the amateurs showed they could win the WSOP lottery and therefore I could as well phase. I bought an incredible set of Super Diamonds, having not bought a custom set of clay chips the year before because we couldn’t adequately design an inlay using late 1990s computer tech. I hosted a lot of tournaments and cash games, not knowing anything about starting stacks. I made a lot of friends that way, and began seeing poker as a social catalyst. During my first big revival tournament, a really drunk dude stumbled in my loft, spilled his beer everywhere, and broke a terracotta pot containing a spider plant with long thin green leaves.
$1: Blue jeans with boogers. After we moved and a brief pause, my wife (a true gem) suggested I start up poker again. I started up a game of fellow dads, a great group of folks. The point was to laugh and swap stories, between teaching folks the basics of poker. Because we could all walk home, it became a bumbling stumbling fest, which made for a great night. I totally made a number of bad calls, but because we were playing cheap poker, I didn’t care. On the first night, stumbling across a park on the way home, the big winner picked his nose and wiped his semi-soft pre-sickness boogers on his blue jeans.
$5: Puss-filled blood-clotting bite bruise on a dirty kid’s leg. But I jumped ahead, so allow me to go back. I first discovered poker on the sandy dune beaches of Mexico as a kid. We would tent an RV and drive down to, what was then a remote and empty Baja beach (Estero Punta Banda) for spring break. We’d goof off with a large group of dads and their sons, playing on the dunes and in the water, running through the concrete shell of a partially constructed resort (later completed). At night, I watched the dads play poker on a small wobbly card table lit by a Coleman propane lantern. Cards; Corona; red, white, and blue plastic Bicycle chips. It was magical. Although the dads shooed us off and wouldn’t let us play, I was intrigued. On the way home from our first trip, I crawled under the RV table and bit the sandy leg of a kid traveling with us, no idea why.
$20: Bloody bird shit on a black t-shirt. I later started playing $20 buy-in games with those same cheap Bicycle chips in a chintzy carousel carrier. We were a group of high school kids playing random circus games, rotating across a number of our houses. Our nickel-dime-quarter games would sometimes balloon into $200 pots with the tom foolery we played. We’d meet up after school, shoot some pool, then head over to someone’s house and play until 2am sometimes. We’d make up variations on games, sometimes it was pure gambling, especially night baseball, with wilds and bonus cards. On our last outing, we were eating outside and a seagull strafed a buddy and his burger, leaving a look of bewilderment and frustration of not getting to eat that burger while we laughed our asses off.
Seriously, the stories may or may not be true, but that’s not why I chose those colors.
I’ve always wanted to work with some of these colors and have been trying to figure out how.
Having decided on the H-mold, I wanted to stay true to the spots and colors available in the mid to late 60s, the tail end of the rat pack era, so I looked backwards for inspiration. It won’t take long to find what inspired me, and I don’t pretend these to be truly original. I just know they’re mine and exactly what I wanted.
