Anyone for poker?

Dan Goodman depicts a respondent to an inquiry on the net getting hung up in what he thinks a question means:

-"In the Old West days, where in London near Cambridge University would a student find bars and salons [sic] with poker games?"-

The inquirer was politely given good information. Told where Cambridge University is, and how far in travel time from London it probably was in the 19th century. That whist would be far more likely as a gambling game than poker. That England wasn't part of the Old West.

I think the respondent is missing the point a bit—I took the question to mean something like "Where in the general area of Cambridge University might a student who preferred poker to other gambling games have found such a game, around the time of Victoria's reign?" I'll grant that the reference to the Old West is weirdly out-of-context, but I didn't take it to mean that the inquirer thinks London was in the Old West, either. (Maybe the student was at some time, though.)