When I was a kid, we used to play poker. It was a dime ante, and no one ever lost more than five bucks in an evening.
Maybe it was the low stakes that encouraged one particularly silly adaptation of the game:
Twos, threes, sevens, one-eyed jacks, and suicide king were wild.
With such a formulation, any hand less than four-of-a-kind didn’t warrant calling a serious raise.
Whenever the dealer announced this mutation, one player, Steve, declared, “I’m out. I came to play poker.”
At the time, I was annoyed. There was a thrill to winning a hand with a straight flush that couldn’t be matched by winning a hand with two pairs.
But as I got older, I realized that Steve was right. While there wasn’t anything dishonest about the game, it wasn’t poker. Making it too easy compromised the soul of the game. Artificially inflating the value of the cards devalued the skill and strategy that made the game worth playing. Redefining the rules to ensure that everyone got a winning hand destroyed all of poker’s tension, drama, and nuance, trading away subtle electricity for a cheap buzz.
Whether in games of chance, the game of business, or the game of life, there have to be rules. Over time–or, to meet new circumstances in a changing world–it sometimes makes sense to modify the rules. But those changes have to make sense, lest we compromise the integrity of the game.
And even when the rules do make sense, the way we play will determine our experience more than the nature of the game itself.
Because, ultimately, the purpose of the game is the game. If we play only to win, we inevitably lose. Only if we play to play are we guaranteed to win no matter who comes out ahead when the dealing’s done.
Each game has rules, and has a meaning, that is, it is not an action performed for the pure purpose of surviving; it is not an instinct, but not a spiritual principle either. What is the purpose of it is a question that still lacks a definitive answer. The game in its essence is fun, a reaction to multiple inputs: from the need to express oneself, to that of using our repressed energy.
If we refer in particular to poker, which is mentioned in the article, in our life we play poker all the time. We choose projects that we believe will make us happy, such as a course of study, a job, a partner or a house, and we invest entire years of our existence in them. Then one bad day, we happen to make the terrible discovery. We were wrong: we bet on the wrong hand, we can’t win! And here we see the true champion who knows how to throw the losing cards as soon as possible and wait for a better hand. The loser, on the other hand, remains “psychologically attached” to his bet. He will enter a vicious mental circle, and in order to take back what he still considers of him, he will continue to risk more and more, ending up losing everything.
Thanks Yonason. Rules often need to be adapted as the world changes. As in pandemic masking up and all making for a bit more safety. Rules often help make forward motion possible for all the players in the game.
blessings,
Cynthia