For years, all I knew about my mother's mother was that she had a brain the size of Brazil.
Her Masters degree, first class honours, was achieved when there were very few women graduates at all, when tertiary education for women was considered to have dangerous consequences.
This congenital girlie swot gene, eagerly repeated by my mother, sailed past me like a right-wing truckie spurning a hippie hitchhiker.
No matter, I would have hated girlie swotdom, the boys at my school loathed them, lashing their backs with fountain pen ink as they worked gruntingly on at their desks impervious to the deluge.
But it was at high school where I first showed a glimmer of application.
By betting on horses.
I would spend Saturday mornings combing through the Turf Digest, Friday Flash and Otago Daily Times racing pages, choosing just one horse to bet on that Saturday afternoon with the $4.29 I received from the Evening Star for working four hours covering sport.
I learned horses' favourite distances, jockeys and tracks, and how many starts they needed to win after a break.
Monastic always won at Wanganui.
My mother watched this activity for a few months and then finally decided to release more details about the grandmother I never knew.
It seems she also bet on horses, researching them thoroughly, almost obsessively, just as I was doing.
And she spread all the relevant paper over the kitchen table on the Saturday morning too.
Darwin was right.
So there's a vibrant congenital gambling gene coursing away in the Colbert DNA.
All the more reason then for me to be perplexed, nay flummoxed, when my wife answers the perennial how-are-the-kids question at prestigious dinner parties by muttering inaudibly from the bottom corner of her mouth that our son is a professional gambler.
Which he is, an internet poker player of intensity and renown.
I am deliriously proud of this ability to metaphorically raise the middle finger to the laws of probability and those tawdry tales of gamblers going bad.
His survival and success in this monstrously difficult milieu should be shouted from the highest rooftops using the full mouth, every syllable flashing in sparkling Nevada neon.
Our son almost exclusively plays tournaments.
Texas Hold 'Em and Omaha High Low.
To play the poker we all know, fifty thousand dollars in the pot, heart in the mouth, he would need a huge stake, a backer.
He did suggest we could be this, and while I could feel the congenital gambling gene fighting to burst clear from the third eye, I finally concluded selling the house and living at the Tahuna Park Motor Camp with no shirt on my back would be too socially demeaning.
Ironically he later found a backer, one of those 21-year-old IT multimillionaires, who trawl poker site statistics to find players to invest in.
They are invariably bad players themselves, and this is the only way they will ever win at poker.
But our son doesn't use him very often, he just plays away quietly and methodically, up to 18 games at a time.
I once played housie at Housie City.
Two cards, OK, three cards, dizzyingly difficult.
As my bus driver said to me last Friday, playing 18 simultaneous games of poker is just plain polygoneutic.
Our son showed me his poker account, in 2009, he played 970,000 hands.
Often the world's finest players, top10 guys, turn up on these sites.
Our boy has knocked the odd one over too, he enjoys offering commiserations in the screen chatbox as they exit the table.
But in cricket, this would be like batting as well as the astonishing Virender Sehwag (world ranking sixth), or in tennis, beating Andy Murray (fifth).
So you see where my rooftop shouting in Nevada neon thing comes from.
This column was going to be about my playing internet poker for one week.
But my cojones weren't up to it.
My grandmother would have been disappointed.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
