It's How You Play It

As I was listening to my colleague passionately explaining the following idea to me, I decided to turn it into a post. In reality, this post was spawned by M.L., but I’m acting as Herodotus now and bringing you the true transcript embellished with only punctuation marks! He he.

Thesis: participating in life situations is a lot like a playing a poker hand.

You start by sitting down at table with several other people. Everyone’s goal is to win, or succeed as much as possible and walk away with more than they came in with. You’re dealt two cards; that’s what you’ve got to work with and make the best of it. It could be a pair of sevens or a pair of Aces, or complete crap or a beginning of a straight flush.

No matter what it is, you’ve got to use those cards in your current set-up. Isn’t it the same in life? We’re dealt different cards in life. It’s how you play that matters. If you’re collected, cool, and calculating, you can go quite far, sometimes surpassing those players with better cards.

At the poker, like in real life, you can approach a situation from different angles – you can try to terrorize everyone at the table by skyrocketing the bets and behaving perhaps irrationally and see who’s going to stand up to you (call your growing bets!). Or you can take risks within limits (raise when you’ve got a great hand and watch out for other vigilant players), or you know when to call it quits and prevent more losses – when to walk away from the situation without causing any more damage to yourself.

It’s about handling your emotions, too, and manipulating the emotions of others. Or not manipulating them at all (no staring, no interrupting, no coughing, or yapping during the game!), and going with the flow. It’s about assessing risks when new information becomes available (the flop, the turn, the river) and changing your strategy accordingly.

This marks the end of my Herodotus role. It’s definitely interesting to watch how people play the game. Is their approach to poker somewhat similar to how they approach life? Can we learn anything from poker and use it to help us in our life? Or, vice versa, can playing poker make us worse off (gambling and all)? You tell me.

Tags: Life poker