I was emailing with some folks this afternoon and was remembering something we used to do in my old game when I was down in Atlanta and thought some folks might have some similar - or likely not so similar - traditions in their home games.
Could be long-running prop bets or a way of settling disputes as below, but I would think there would be some entertaining stories.
Mine:
When I was a kid I spent a lot of the summer time at my grandparents' place which was then in the country (Grandfather still lives there, but now it's basically in the middle of the suburbs thanks to sprawl). When I would fight with my cousins, my grandfather made us put on boxing gloves and go at it until someone tapped out.
I brought this back in my game in Atlanta. I first mentioned it as sort of a joke, but once the practice was established, when guys would start sniping at each other at the table, we'd egg them on and eventually one would break and challenge the other to a boxing match.
The twists: (1) I only had one pair of gloves; and (2) both my front and back yards were on about a 30 degree slope. The solutions: if they were differently-handed, each took the glove of their dominant hand; if same-handed, they flipped for who got which glove. The guy who got the glove for his dominant hand had to start out below the other on the sloped back yard. If they were same handed, they started out parallel on the slope.
There was a lot of drinking in these games, so usually it was over pretty quickly when one of them landed a good one and the other tumbled downhill into the fence. But there were probably 4 or 5 instances where it went on for quite a while. Only 1 ever developed into a serious fight that had to be broken up.
Could be long-running prop bets or a way of settling disputes as below, but I would think there would be some entertaining stories.
Mine:
When I was a kid I spent a lot of the summer time at my grandparents' place which was then in the country (Grandfather still lives there, but now it's basically in the middle of the suburbs thanks to sprawl). When I would fight with my cousins, my grandfather made us put on boxing gloves and go at it until someone tapped out.
I brought this back in my game in Atlanta. I first mentioned it as sort of a joke, but once the practice was established, when guys would start sniping at each other at the table, we'd egg them on and eventually one would break and challenge the other to a boxing match.
The twists: (1) I only had one pair of gloves; and (2) both my front and back yards were on about a 30 degree slope. The solutions: if they were differently-handed, each took the glove of their dominant hand; if same-handed, they flipped for who got which glove. The guy who got the glove for his dominant hand had to start out below the other on the sloped back yard. If they were same handed, they started out parallel on the slope.
There was a lot of drinking in these games, so usually it was over pretty quickly when one of them landed a good one and the other tumbled downhill into the fence. But there were probably 4 or 5 instances where it went on for quite a while. Only 1 ever developed into a serious fight that had to be broken up.