Bluff it Baby….
Rules were created with the single objective to level the playing field. The intention being to accurately account for athleticism, smarts and civility, but how is it that everyone is assigned a distinct, inimitable handicap, before knowing by default, we’re all playing the same game.
The Unencumbered Coup…
World Series Poker No-limit Hold’em in 1978.
It’s the championship finals and Bobby Baldwin was the 23-year-old joke of a poker player, he is rivaled against the favored Crandall Addington, real estate tycoon from Texas, and also the favored victor. Addington had $275,000 chips compared to Baldwin’s measly $145,000. With a slight hesitation following a $95,000 bet was all Baldwin needed for his zero-sum bluff, he threw in the rest of his chips in – convincing Addington that he either had a flush or a straight. After tossing his cards on the table revealing a nine and a ten of hearts made Baldwin the youngest WSP champion, and making Addington the “ASS” who got played. Now, Baldwin is the President of the Bellagio Hotel is Las Vegas, among being inducted in the Poker Hall of Fame.
Oh, the yucky and annoying paradox of choice, gimme, hold, fold ‘em, to bet all or lose nothing. To not choose equates to inaction, to remain passive can be interpreted as proactive. Yes, no or why bother having an opinion, right? Or wrong? Warren Buffet believes the first rule in finance is never to lose – and the second, forget the first. So, we’re supposed to forget to win?
Not to frame our forefathers as myopic wasps, but it is true that the makeup of our country was written hundreds of years ago by philosophical nerds. Were these “marvelously elastic,” (as Roosevelt believed) free market commandments flexible enough to actually address our migration, terrorist and poverish problems? Example: AK45s had yet to be invented when Adams and Jefferson, or hell, Jesus was around.
Anomalous Upbringing
Born in a privileged family in Johannesburg, one of eight in Corsica, a Kennedy, or an autistic, each has a bizarre and unpredictable amalgamation of luck – some obviously more debilitating than others. But with only a certain combination of cards, each chip has to be gambled with cognizance, aware not of how far there is to fall, but there is always, always an opportunity to win. If you know how to convince people there could be an opportunity.
Cards alone can’t break the bank: How many rich snots have been coddled with Ivy-League education, pristine genetics and healthy and generous portions of time with confidence-boosting parents? And failed.
That said, people yes, can win with a combo of cards and smarts - just so happens you’re Bill Gates and your parents happened to donate thousands to your private school technology department, and pretty much fate is in your favor? Sure, but aside from his prerequisites, Gates was, and is a shrewd, inventive guy – locating holes in future markets, and crafting science in industries that didn’t yet, exist.
And then there are the J.K Rowlings whose imagination and scribbles consisted of a wizard and a child sporting ugly glasses – and has sold more books than any other book in the history of the world (sans the bible). And she drafted such a jewel homeless on London sidewalks. Barack Obama’s heroic feat has been an archetype for how circumstance can be overcome– and even, quotes from Helen Keller commemorate how obstacles can eventually inspire others.
Then Win....
While you might think I’ve digressed from faking it and making it, to outperforming others while bogged down with the severities and injustices some are born into, there is a reason a winning hand in poker is pure in its reflection of success. The sharpest poker players read between the lines, under the facial expressions, behind the smirks and through the fear, while still playing by the same rules.
In poker it there is no value in how savvy you’re dressed, what town you’ve been raised and what is your native tongue… The outcome isn’t a result of how people judge what you’re capable of understanding – and calculating – and achieving, the outcome is if you alone, can play your cards better than everyone else expects.
