Poking for life

This is a re-print. This, I think, is the first among the few things I've written about poker. You can see how naive the thoughts are.

“You don’t gamble. You grind it out.”

-- Matt Damon

Rounders, 1998

I know the title sounds kinda kinky. What I meant was playing poker professionally. Having smoothened the rough edges of your green minds, let me ask you this: would you give up your day job when you’re earning between PhP1,000.00 and PhP5,000.00 per night playing poker?

If you have a good streak (in poker parlance it’s called card rush) and win PhP5,000.00 for thirty days straight, that amounts to PhP 150,000.00 per month (that’s $3,061.22 per month on a $1.00 = PhP49.00 exchange rate). Paradise on earth, don't you think?

Enticing? No doubt.

Working in an insecure environment, facing the hazards of late night shifts going to and from the office, and a huge chunk of your salary going straight into the pockets of corrupt bureaucrats disguised as taxation , poker seems to be a good alternative to the mechanical and boring nine hour desk job. Are you getting the picture?

There’s only one problem. You better be good at it.

I’ve been lured to such an idea of winning it big a few months ago. I have to admit it’s very tempting. I’ve been playing poker for several months now and I’m a regular at the Master’s Poker Club at Bocobo Street, in Malate, Manila. I usually play tournaments with a very affordable buy-in (Php200.00 with a PhP1,000.00 cash pool. If I have extra cash, I play the 500 buy-in with a cash pool of PhP50,000.00) and sometimes at the PhP25-Php50 blinds cash game. If I’m not at my regular club, I play home games with my buddies.

And I totally suck!

Poker, though it looks simple on the surface, is a very complex game. You can learn its rules in minutes, but as the legends of the game say, “it takes a lifetime to master.” There’s a lot of math and psychology involved in the “sport” and it’s a brain-wrecking activity.

The word “sport” is in quotation marks because it’s still a gray area. Many people still consider it gambling because there are cards and cash involved. Although there are players, both local and international, who are now living “the great life,” many players are sucked into the game, lose thousands (even millions) of cash and get stuck for life. It’s a dangerous sport.

But when you really think about it, poker is no different from our everyday affairs. Business transactions have risks, relationships sometimes need a little bit of aggression and sometimes they need to be folded. Our actions no matter how quaint the idea, should be calculated for us to reach our goals.

Of course we cannot perfectly equate poker with real life. Although imperfect information is present in both, poker’s payoff structure is fixed while life’s much more dynamic.

In poker, assuming you have a bad hand and the pot’s not large, you can easily fold. You’re not supposed to do that in real life. Sometimes life is a pain and just because it sucks doesn’t mean you have to fold whatever life has dealt you with and call it quits.

But there are things we can learn from poker about real life. Poker gives its players an opportunity to take control of their game regardless of the hand they’re dealt with. You could check or fold, bet or raise. You could also sweeten the pot by re-raising or to isolate other players from winning what’s being fought for.

The same thing goes with life. If you want to hit it big, there are instances in which you need to play it really “tight,” while there are situations when you know you need to be loose. There are moments, say in a partnership, that you need to be aggressive, and there are times when you just have to fold your hand and give it up. In other words, poker is about the person and how he controls the situation.

I think that’s what makes poker very interesting. It gives the player some degree of control that he doesn’t normally get in real life. If he loses a hand or makes the wrong play, the culprit could either be him or that horrible thing called “bad beat.” It’s the same thing with life but the consequences are not as damaging as poker’s.

So, will I play poker professionally? I would love to but I have to think it through. I’m enjoying every bit of it but I have to admit, it’s “hard work.”