Strange language

I was just reading Todd Brunson's column in the July 28 Card Player magazine. It included this brief story about a mixed-game tournament he was playing, with Phil Hellmuth at the table:

A few hands later, the game was razz, and Phil again tried to dump me some
chips. I raised from the one hole with like six small cards behind me, and Phil
reraised me with a 7 up. Nice hand there, Phil--lol, I mean, did he really think
I had raised into six babies with an 8 in the hole?

I had a 3 up with A-2 in the hole. The one redeeming factor for Phil was
that he might have had a 5 in the hole, as there were three out. But that proved
not to be the case, as Phil bricked on fourth street (as did three others,
including me), then hit the miracle 5 on fifth street.

The only thing remarkable about this account, for me, was the sudden realization that it would have been complete jibberish to me, say, three years ago, before I had played my first hand of razz. Even with a pretty solid understanding of hold'em, I would have had no comprehension of what this story was relating, or the underlying strategic concepts.

I have a few readers who know little or nothing about poker. They read the blog because they know me personally and want to keep up with what I'm doing and thinking. Once in a while I pause and realize how nonsensical it must sound when I write a paragraph or a story that is chock-full of poker terminology and shorthand allusions to strategic concepts that I tend to assume my readers understand without having it all laid out in detail.

The thing that most commonly reminds me of this is when Memphis Mojo does a post about bridge rather than poker, and I'm left scratching my head, trying to grasp what the hell he is talking about--since I don't even know how the game goes. Take this bit from earlier today, for example:

West led the ♦8, a singleton! This has to be an awful lead. Does he
really hope his partner will win the ace and give him a ruff? Haha.

Kate won and led a low diamond to ruff. West was now void, but couldn't
beat my ♠9. Of course, I wouldn't have opened without that card, ahem. She
now had 13 tricks: She took six spades, two hearts, two diamonds, two clubs and
one ruff.

This all means precisely nothing to me. It might as well be written in Egyptian hieroglyphics. It makes me feel a bit stupid, though logically it shouldn't; I'm simply not informed about the relevant subject matter. (In my defense, I recently had occasion, on a completely unrelated writing project, to toss off a paragraph considering porphyria cutanea tarda, mononeuritis multiplex, reflex sympathetic dystrophy, and venous stasis dermatitis, and I'm guessing that Memphis Mojo would be the one left scratching his head over that. So there! Ha!)

All of which is just to say this: Thanks to the non-pokery people who put up with what must be a nearly continual sense of bewilderment at the poker jargon found here. I actually do have some sympathetic sense of how foreign it must feel.