Saturday, August 25, 2007
WARNING : NOT FUNNY AGAIN
FORT MINOR LYRICS "Slip Out The Back"
Listen its like poker you can play your best
But you got to know when to fold your cards and take a rest
And know when to hold your cards and hold your breath
And hope that nobody else is stacking the deck because
I don't need to tell you that life isn't fair, it doesn't care
It arbitrarily cuts off your air, and like you I want someone to say its OKAY
Life is like Poker. ( school)
During a very boring lecture, I once thought of this. “If there was one thing you could learn and benefit most from in class, what would be it?”Straight away, my brain felt alive and kicking, Ninjitsu? To defend myself from enemies? Or weaponry, learning to kill with just a bullet, wouldn’t that just be exhilarating. Why not soccer, so I’ll be a famous star like David Beckham (who is so famous his name is even included in my Microsoft word dictionary. Wow) after much deliberation, I threw away my boyish childhood dreams and finally settled upon a logical choice. Poker. It’s a game full of flair and heart.
For the unknowing, it’s a card game ( which is banned in school) in which the players draw cards and try to use the betting of their stakes to impress, mislead or utterly crush his opponent. And yes, money, the ever exciting stimulant is involved. One can be a millionaire from just one nail-biting round, or a pauper who has his cash mercilessly torn from him. It’s a cruel game, I must admit.“
Gambling is a vice, you’ll be hooked on it and will keep losing money till you end up being hacked to death by a loan shark who wasted five pig heads on you, before he realised you didn’t get the message.” Very true indeed.
First, let me ask you a question. Isn’t life a gamble? Every day, you walk out on the streets, as you cross the road, don’t you weigh the risks that a truck is going to steamroll over you? Perhaps it’s because the chances of that is negligible, and that urges you to place your bet, which in this case, your life, on the action of crossing the road. Even a simple thing like crossing the road, can be broken up into a game of poker. What more life, in a macro view, it itself is a game of costly poker.In it, there can only be two outcomes.
You win, or you lose. When to buy a house, when to sell it; How to get promoted, how not to get demoted; When to spend and when to save. Aren’t all these choices with risks involved in the game of life? To succeed, one must make the best choices and have the heart to stomach the risks. From the above, it brings us back to our point. How do you train this skill? That’s when poker comes into play. It teaches you how to make do with what you have, and transform it into something better. When dealt with an ugly hand, one would know when to fold and take a rest. Analogize this to stop pursuing a lost cause. However when dealt with a trump card, you would know how to press on to maximize your wins. This is the essence of success.
Maybe you’ll lose, after all life is unpredictable. Yet, with this refined skill, success in anything would come much easier, and losses minimized. In conclusion, we can see that the skill of playing poker can be applied to life itself.
On a completely unrelated and random note, I am still wondering if choosing the risky option of submitting my blog on Saturday , one day past the deadline would be realised and punished by our fair English-teacher in-charge.