My Father’s Name is Poker
What Poker Taught Me About Life that My Dysfunctional Parents Could Not
Some people were just not raised right, plain and simple. I was one of them. I grew up semi-Mormon in the Salt Lake City suburbs with a multiple-Vietnam-tour/racist-and-sexist-southerner stepfather and a mother whom I’m pretty sure was just tired of everything. I was extremely socially awkward, full of unanswerable questions about my gender and sexuality, and getting little advice from my small world that was relevant to big world outside. Naturally, I fell on my face repeatedly throughout my 20s as I attempted to incorporate myself into reality.
Then came my Lord and Savior: Texas Hold ’Em Poker.
I ran into this game when I started working as a manager at a gas station chain in Phoenix. I had hit the reset button on my adulthood for probably the fifth time at this point, slowly learning the world for which I was ill-prepared, when a few coworkers invited me to this game. The stakes were low: twenty bucks to buy in, play tournament style, drink a beer, smoke a bowl. It was a relief to realize in this haven of camaraderie that maybe I was not the most messed-up person in the room, so I sat down and learned the game.
Over the next ten years, the game helped me to understand real-world concepts in a simulated environment. Poker conjures intense emotional and logical conundrums that one may not be able to feasibly address in the world without committing a felony. The game is a way to get to know the real person, not the facade they have learned to put up to survive in society, not the words they tell themselves to keep going. A single string bet or a hero call can tell you what this person is really made of. On the other hand, poker is also really good at letting you know what kind of person you really are. Do you fold to aggression? Do you bully the table with oversized bets? From early on, I started to make sense about a lot of crucial concepts in life.
Managing emotions. I sucked at baseball so much. I could not hit the damn thing to save me and it angered and humiliated me swinging that stupid bat while my stepfather barked out commands. In my rage, he would tell me, “anger is a part of being a man, focus your anger on the ball.” This, of course, is the terrible advice of my viking berserker stepfather. By that time I already had problems with anxiety and depression and, growing up in the Testosterone Life, it was often converted to bursts of rage. It would go on to cost me quite a few jobs, make practicing an instrument unbearable, and usually end with me sobbing in a heap of rubble.
It was in poker, when my flopped two pair of aces and tens got coolered by a set of threes five minutes into the game, that I learned to acknowledge how absolutely frustrating some things are. I learned to sit out a few hands, go outside, and come back after the heat of the moment waned. In life, you absolutely cannot play on tilt: you’ll burn down everything you’re trying to build.
Accepting failure. I had a coddling mother. I imagine she did it in some half-witted attempt to counteract my stepfather constant berating. I had absolutely no tolerance for failure and the moment I slipped at something, I trainwrecked. This caused me to avoid anything I could not do perfectly, resulting in me being good at very few things. I entered adulthood somehow thinking I was destined for greatness despite having no real skills, assets, or direction and the end result was having what could have been the prime of my life devolve into a disappointing shitshow.
Poker taught me to look at what I have, no matter how pretty those pocket Aces might be, and think of numbers because numbers do not care about you. You learn humility and realism. You learn not to fall in love with your hand, which helps you plan for when your Aces get cracked. Playing good poker comes from knowing that you’re going to lose at least as much as you win. The focus becomes not on winning every hand, but knowing what a loss means when it comes. Understanding failure is an extremely important facet of any entrepreneurial mind.
How to take a calculated risk. In tandem with the comically misguided megalomania from my self-destructive youth, I attended the Berklee College of Music. I remember my mother saying, “if this is your dream you shouldn’t worry about the price tag, you should give your dream a shot.” I should have worried about the price tag. Leaving this school with no prospects and a debilitating amount of student debt, this is where I first learned that the numbers did not care about me. It was a very rude awakening.
Little did I know that my mother telling me to “give it a shot” is the guiding philosophy of the poker stereotype we all know and love: the “Calling Station.” This person is a spade away from the nut flush on the turn and will pay anything to see that last card, nevermind the fact that 80% of the time, this does not pan out. Working at a gas station at 30, it was getting pretty clear to me what reckless dream-chasing does to the unlucky. In the real world, you have to step back and look at what you’re putting into this and ask yourself “do I have a quantifiable reason to believe this is worth it?” Quantifiable. That word alone might have salvaged my 20s.
Emotional intelligence. I carry a legacy of family narcissism. I still can get too wrapped up in myself to really acknowledge anyone else’s view, and it is a significant improvement over how I was. The lesson I got from my stepdad was pretty obvious: emotions are for women and women are inferior, therefore emotions are inferior. So what do I do about them when I have them? For this, my mother’s lesson was much more sinister: put your emotions in a jar and live and put it on the shelf then, when no one is around, take your emotions out of the jar and feel them. It’s hard to deal with other people’s feelings when you’ve got enough of your own.
Poker is evil by nature. It is ruthless, exploitative, and aggressive. I love it for that: we all have a demon in us and we all need a way to exorcise it without destroying the world. Poker acknowledges this demon and gives it a comparatively harmless space to play, but it requires a tremendous degree of emotional intelligence to do it well. Growing up, it was easier for me to live thinking I was the only thing in the world that was real and consequently, I projected myself into everyone. It made it very difficult for me to read a room or a person, which plagued my game for years. It wasn’t until I learned to pay attention to other people beside myself, to put myself in their skin for a moment, that I could truly understand how they perceived the world around them. That way, I could turn that information against them and crush them. Poker is evil, after all.
Dealing with bullies. I was a scrawny kid. When my stepfather insisted I play sports, I played with the year younger than me because it was that bad. I think half the time he beat me, he was trying to incite a rage in me that would lead to a legitimate fight between us. However, he was a detective and a police trainer. By eighth grade he had already put my sister in a sleeper hold in front of the family and pointed a gun at me after throttling me in the garage. In the fight-or-flight response of my daily life, I would always choose flight. In junior high, this made me a ripe target for anyone bigger than me, which was practically everyone. When my growth spurt finally came, I had learned how to out-crazy my aggressors, which worked until they called my bluff.
Bullies are a part of life. They shouldn’t be but they are, that’s why they’re bullies. Bullying is a survival response in its own right: it is the “fight” side of the fight-or-flight response. There is always that one guy who shoves his stack in on every hand and pushes everyone out just to pick up the blinds. A bully in poker, a bully in junior high, a bully as a parent — they are all just as afraid of something as the people they pick on. I knew all about the coercion of fear by eighth grade and twisting the fearmongering of a bully against them is probably one of the most fulfilling feelings I can ever have. However, calling a bully out is the culmination of every other life lesson: risk management, emotional stability and most importantly, empathy are crucial when staring down the big-stack. It’s a helluva fight, it’s a helluva win, and it’s always satisfying to see the Mighty Asshole of the table get picked apart after they’ve been exposed.
Winning — and losing — with grace. Failure was not an option growing up. I remember being hardcore grounded for a full year after coming home with 3.0 GPA on my report card in seventh grade. My parents dissected, criticized, drilled, and chiseled every facet of me in my early puberty. I was going to be the World’s Greatest Human Being, no exceptions, no excuses. Naturally I was terrified of failure which, ironically, fueled some serious failures in my life. This has probably been the single hardest hurdle my parents set up for me to get over. Even now, I can get disappointed if I’m not immediately better than everyone at everything all the time.
If there is one thing you must know about poker going into it is that you are going to lose. Even fully mitigating the variance of luck and skill, a professional high-stakes player can only reasonably expect to win half the sessions they sit down in. What about that other half? What about those moments where your flopped two pair gets coolered by a set of 3s? What about that string of hands where your opponent was just in your head? What about the days where it just… doesn’t work?
You shake their hand, you say “good game,” and you let yourself feel the defeat. Defeat hurts and you are worthy of that pain. On the other hand, when you are in your opponent’s head, twisting their mind into an agonizing and humiliating defeat, don’t forget to shake their and say “good game.” You cannot be a good player, a good sport, or a good person in general if you cannot understand and accommodate the feelings of the person in front of you.
Living a good and wise life takes analysis as well as passion. One has to look at their emotions and place against the backdrop of what actually exists and then ask themselves, “where is this feeling coming from?” One also has to look at cold reality and superimpose it against human emotion and ask themselves, “where can I take this?” Playing good poker — and living a good life — demands good answers to both of these questions. If only I’d learned this game in seventh grade, then maybe I could have raised my parents better.
