The bubble, or what you have to lose
What I've learned about life from playing poker and a poem by TS Eliot.
I was a late learner to poker, and I wouldn’t dare describe myself as a late bloomer. Maybe that time will come.
When I was a kid my father had a standing appointment on Friday nights in a local community center for the game that I only now learn is called “five-card draw”: each player is dealt five cards and can replace up to three of them in later betting rounds.
In this variant, there are no so-called “community” cards. Each player’s hand is each player’s hand and his hand alone.
The game that has taken off around the world, in the World Series of Poker that offers more than $12 million to the winner, to millions of games of online poker happening at this very moment on a computer near you, is called Texas Hold’Em.
In this game you have just two “hole” cards that are yours and yours alone. The rest of the cards are everyone’s: three cards making up the “flop”, another called the “turn” and the fifth and final community card called the “river”.
There are multiple rounds of betting — pre-flop, post-flop, after the river and after the turn.
One of the most interesting things about Texas Hold’Em is that it’s typically played without betting or pot limits. In other words, at every betting opportunity in every hand, you and everyone else at the table have the opportunity to get all your chips in the middle.
Hold’Em might be the ultimate game of risk and reward and probability. If you make enough of the right decisions you can climb the chip stack ladder quickly. If you make enough of the wrong ones — or even just one — you can go to zero in an instant.
Poker vs Chess
Poker interests me in ways that chess, for example, never did.
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