So here is the thing about Dogs Playing Poker: Every dog I’ve ever met has a terrible poker face, and almost every dog I’ve ever met bluffs way too much to win at poker.

Take Flo the Chihuahua, for instance. She is very even-tempered in the sense that she’s always pissed off, and she plays poker like she does everything else—she tries to substitute anger and good looks for substance. Against an inexperienced poker player—say, my wife or Ringer the Australian Shepherd—Flo’s style can intimidate somebody into folding a stronger hand, but like literally everything else in Flo’s life, the chubby Chihuahua will inevitably overplay her hand and find herself enviously looking on as Dave the Human eats all the tacos and doesn’t give her any. The key is to use Flo’s pride against her. She just can’t bear to accept the reality that she is small and so are her cards.

Ringer, on the other hand, has no pride, so the savvy dog playing poker against this hyperactive Aussie will need a different strategy, albeit one that is relatively easy to execute. She has absolutely no capacity for reading another dog’s poker face—hence, very easy to bluff—but Ringer has a clever knack for reacting to every single hand, no matter how good or bad, with the exact same facial expression of intense excitement and happiness. Of course, this one asset isn’t enough, as Flo has long since figured out her way around Ringer’s one-trick-pony strategy.

Now, you might expect Rexi the Border Collie to be the best of the dogs playing poker in my house simply because she is clearly the smartest and most ruthless. I know I expected her to be the one to walk away from the table with a smile on her face, but it turns out that her alpha-dog ego makes her overconfident. Rexi’s not vulnerable to Flo’s scorched-earth tactics, and Ringer will basically fold her cards whenever Rexi commands it—a real flaw in Ringer’s tactics—but like a lot of bullies, Rexi freezes up when a new tough guy takes a seat at the table. Hedo the Turkey, no grand strategist herself, only had to play one beak-shaped ace to chase Rexi out of a hand, and now the border collie refuses to play poker again until after Thanksgiving.

I think it’s important that people don’t get the wrong idea about dogs playing poker. The paintings always make it look like some kind of friendly game, where the worst thing you see is maybe a bulldog trying to sneak an ace under the table while his buddy ruins his lungs with a cheap cigar. But underneath the glamor of it all is a dark truth: dogs playing poker is a messy business.

Dogs are bad at poker, and they are sore losers. They bring their preexisting beefs to the table with them, and none of them have any kind of financial plan for how to manage their losses. Dogs playing poker never ends like in the paintings. It’s all just barking, stress, hurt feelings, and financial hardships.

My dogs have the nicest dog house in the world. I know because I thought it was going to be my house when I bought it. The thing I thought was going to be my sanctuary--my castle even--turned out to be my dogs’ kingdom, a realm in which I neither reign nor rule. My wife and I march to the beat of our dogs’ drums, and they’re terrible musicians.

The result of this state of affairs is what can only truly be called a dog house. I’m not talking about the red-roofed thing Snoopy slept on. I’m talking about a house--the kind with a mortgage and real estate taxes--in which dogs are real parts of the family. A dog house.

So what are the essential elements of a true dog house? Here is my list:

1 – Dog hair everywhere

You’re not really taking this list seriously if you don’t start here. There’s the balls of dust and fur that gather in corners that the Roomba can’t get to. There’s the random dog hair that you see on your plate when you’re trying to eat leftovers in front of the TV. There’s the hair all over your clothes that forces you to keep an emergency lint roller in your car. And, of course, there’s the bane of every dog owner’s existence--the dog hair in the mouth. In my dog house, hardly a day goes by that I don’t have to dig some gross dog hair out of my mouth, and that doesn’t even account for Fantom Dog Hair Syndrome, where you think you have a dog hair in your mouth but maybe you’re just imagining it. 

2 – At least one medium-expensive dog bed that never actually gets slept on by a dog

Okay, maybe this one doesn’t happen to everybody, but it happens to a lot of us. You buy your dog a nice, expensive dog bed--and the dog doesn’t use it. She’ll use every other soft surface she can find to lie on, but there is something about the not-cheap bed purchased explicitly for that purpose that makes the dog bed undesirable for any of my dogs to actually lie on. 

3 – Random puddles of dog slobber--or worse?

The big dog puddles will stop being a big problem after you and the furry buddy figure out how to deal with the grossest of it, but there are other more-subtle-but-also-kinda-gross little puddles to look out for. The nearly universal one for dog owners is the drool puddle. Some dogs drool a lot, others only a little. Some will helpfully drop most of their drool into an easily gathered puddle while other dogs seem to like spreading their slobber in diverse artistic patterns across the house like a canine Andy Warhol (Andy Woofhol? No? Okay.). There’s also the water-vomit, where a dog gulps down too much water too quickly and then promptly yacks it up in the next room and the wet-fur smear from when a wet dog comes in the house and lies down on the hardwood.

4 – Destuffed dog toy carcasses strewn about like a World War 1 no-man’s land

Maybe you have gentle dogs that handle their toys with loving care. Our dogs--dare I say most dogs out there--are more of the destroying-because-it’s-fun types. Combine that with a pair of parents who don’t feel like we are loving our dogs hard enough if we aren’t constantly buying them new toys, and what you get are mangled and de-stuffed dog toys everywhere. Now, you may ask, “Why don’t you just quit buying all the frigging dog toys?” At least part of the answer is that there are times when I’m willing to pick up a zillion toy bits later in exchange for some peace and quiet right now. 

5 -- A bark circus whenever the doorbell rings

Every dog owner has experienced this. You are doing something that requires a minimal level of noise--maybe napping, maybe concentrating on work, or maybe you're in an online meeting--and the doorbell rings. In a dogless house, this is a momentary noise that you might even happily ignore if you know it’s an Amazon delivery or something. But in a dog house, the doorbell ringing sets dogs into hyper alarm mode, which is great when you are in actual danger, but it can be a huge interruption for a routine delivery. If only some ingenious inventors would come up with something . . .