‘How I Met Your Mother’ season 9, episode 5 preview: Cobie Smulders joins ‘The Poker Game’

Last night’s “How I Met Your Mother” episode isn’t going to win any awards for being particularly hilarious; instead, it was one of those episodes that was more necessary to have as a way to tell the story of how Barney is able to get over the fact that Ted still has feelings for his fiancee.

Now, we turn to “The Poker Game,” a half-hour that seems to be completely ready to revel in some of its own silliness. You have a friendly competition that could turn unfriendly in a matter of seconds; if nothing else, Barney could just have his eyes scarred courtesy of his mom (Frances Conroy) playing strip poker with Robin. We don’t know how this happened, but somehow Cobie Smulders and Wayne Brady have gotten themselves involved in the competition after being absent for it last night. (We did, however, see plenty of competition via William Zabka of “The Karate Kid.”)

Want to see some more pertaining to everything else happening in this episode? Then just read the official synopsis below via CBS:

“When Barney is forced to pick sides in a fight between Robin and his mother, Lily coaches him on how not to ruin his relationship. Meanwhile, Ted and Marshall get into a dispute over wedding gifts and thank-you notes.”

So basically, Marshall is still going to find a way to get involved in this story without really being fully involved in the story. The biggest issue that we see ourselves having with this is that there’s no way to get Sherri Shepherd in every episode, and we find it very hard to believe that her fast-talking, opinionated character is going to be cool with having Marshall spend the vast majority of his time on the car trip blabbing to people via Skype.

What do you think about this promo, and do you really need more poker after what we saw on the show last night? Read our full review for that here, and we should have some more silliness related to this episode soon.

Photo: CBS