Poker Game versus the Game of Life

LIFE’S circumstances pushed me back to come home to this awesome city. The decision was not hard to make, I was looking forward to being reunited with my family and friends. I was not even sure why I left in the first place. Yet since I got back here, I was weighed down with truckloads of work.

Needless to say, I needed a break. As I try to manage my time, all my schedule can afford are leisure times after dinner. This led me to this quite awesome community game called “poker.”

Older people may connote poker as gambling and they are probably right (although it does not necessarily have to involve money). Yet there's a lot of lessons I learned from the game. Let me share with you why I like it so much.

In poker:

1. Everyone is equal the moment you sit down at the table regardless of age, gender and status. At the poker table, the competition is fair. Everyone gets an equal chance. Discrimination doesn't exist, unlike in life.

2. Although the community cards (flop, turn and river) may increase one’s chance of winning, it is still the player who determines his winning/losing through his folds, calls and raise of bet, not like in the real world where roughly everything that one enjoys isn't his doing, with a few exceptions of course.

3. Sometimes, all a player needs is a bluff to win everything. In life, on the other hand, bluffing can only lead us as far.

4. Last (and the best lesson I learned in poker) is that in order to win, one needs to be ruthless.

I like playing poker. It makes me feel invincible. I feel in total control even just for an hour or so. It makes me own my choices. It gives me a sense of power.

But poker is not life. In life, equality hardly exists, fair-play is just an idea, and even our very own choices are greatly determined by circumstances.

Life, unlike poker, is not a game of power and control, rather a game of service and surrender. It is not a game of invincibility, but a game of humility and humiliation.

In life, you don't need to be ruthless to win, you only need to love.

In life, winning does not mean having it all, rather, it means emptying and sharing it all. That is why in as much as I like poker, I only see it as a hobby, a break when I get tired of fighting life's battle, a pause when I get shattered into pieces, a moment of charging so that when I feel better again I’d be on my feet to face the game of life, the game of love.

(Published in the Sun.Star Cagayan de Oro newspaper on July 27, 2012.)