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Sometimes you gamble and win. Sometimes you leave the table with fifty bucks.

The other night I was embroiled in gambling combat with a wide array of surly bizkids, bizkids who calculate the odds and know the percentages and waste their nights playing Texas Hold'em on the internet. Some were more sharky than others - two crept downstairs to join our table after hearing our raucous jokes: We were the Special-Ed Table, the short bus of poker. They sat down, business students with business faces, clearly looking to wipe us clean. We wiped them clean and their faces turned dark with rage as their stacks of chips left for greener pastures.

I laughed and had fun. They did not enjoy this: clearly poker is deadly serious and should be treated with the sombre reverence of a triple-bypass heart operation. They lost and they scowled and they left bathed in bitterness and a vendetta against Lady Luck. There's no fun in poker, not when you lose.

What a shitty mentality. I realize poker, particularly Texas Hold'em, has become the faddiest fad in fadtown. I realize that gambling is a terrible vice and that everywhere, every day, thousands of disheveled adults stumble to their parents' computer in their underwear to win back their shattered respect and savings online. But hey, what do I care about them?

Poker, as I see it, is a game. It's a chance to sit down with a bunch of random people and fuck with their heads, whether they're friends or complete strangers. Once you know the basics, Texas Hold'em is half luck and half psychology - sure, certain bizkids might argue that statistics are important too, but remember that those bizkids lost pitifully. Numbers are nothing all alone.

As a generation of apathetic, isolationist computer geeks, we need interpersonal competition and banter. Poker, no matter how trendy, fills those needs nicely - you sit around a table for hours, talking shit and gauging reactions. The problems kick in when competitive natures overwhelm the game; when winning is everything and losing is unacceptable. These are the angry elements at a table, the detrimentals and the sharks.

Poker is only healthy when you play with open-minded acceptance of the idea that you might *gasp* lose. The ten or twenty bucks that you dropped on the table? Assume that it's flying right out the window; that you dropped the cash for several hours of entertainment and that you'll never see it again. Oftentimes a poker game is more cost-efficient (I hate using that term) than other kinds of fun like movies or high-priced call girls, so why worry about winning and making your money back? Even if you lose, you got a pretty good deal out of the night. You got a twenty dollar lesson for next time.

And so, when I pulled out a third-place finish and actually won something instead of contributing (as usual) to the winner's pool, I was astounded, not vindicated. I wasn't pissed that I had lost to two players who were obviously better than me. I took what I could get and it was a great deal more than I expected. I got more.

Would I be this enthusiastic about defending poker if I had lost miserably? Probably. If I've learnt anything from poker, it's to aim low, set the bar at knee-height, and revel in anything that goes your way. If things don't go your way, that's okay too - you wasted some time and did just as well as you expected going in.

Now go home and pass out, you gambling son of a bitch. Your wife will be wondering where the welfare check went, and you'd better be asleep when she gets back from drinking. Hide the cutlery.

Posted by Chris at 04:12 PM >> Commentations (2)