God and Poker

“Shuffle up and deal,” and then there was light! Poker junkies, like myself, will recognize the first half of this sentence as the words used to kick off the World Series of Poker every year. It is the sign for the dealers to shuffle their cards, and then deal out the hands to the players at each table. The second part of line should be recognizable to, well, most of Western civilization. These are some of the first words in the Old Testament, which mark the beginning of God’s creating the world.

Though my mom despises poker, a lot of life lessons can be learned at the poker table. These lessons though, don’t strike you outright—they are really gleaned by analogy from the situations presented. The poker table, in many ways, is a microcosm for many situations in life, and the strategies used to win at poker can often be extended into analogies for strategies that prove successful in life.

Trust me, if I have learned one thing from playing poker, it is that you cannot actually learn life lessons or become a better person by playing poker. Most poker players I know are among the sleaziest and saddest people I have ever met. When your entire livelihood depends solely upon deception, your character tends to take a turn towards the ignominious. Playing poker, I’ve realized, every so often, is fun. But when you play too much, you become obsessed with the idea of “being someone you aren’t,” and you become callous and even deceitful. But I have gotten way off topic.

One analogy I really like from poker is an extension of “play the cards you’re dealt.” In poker, there is a combination of factors that lead to winning a hand. The first factor is the cards you are dealt, which for our sake, we will say is “you,” or the person. The second factor that creates a winning hand is the “community cards.” These are the cards that everyone needs to use to make the winning hand. This is similar to the “environment” of a situation, since it represents the situations with which everyone must deal. The final factor is how you play your cards, or rather, what you make your opponents think you have.

Now that we have that established, some interesting ideas start to emerge. You can call it a philosophy on life, a philosophy of religion, a philosophy of God, or whatever you want. Here is how I see it:

When you are born, you are given certain characteristics, by a God, by Nature, call it whatever you want. But the interesting thing is, these initial characteristics are not directly related to any final result. While good starting hands are more likely to win, there is no guarantee of this. The best hand to start with in poker is “pocket aces.” You already have a pair of aces, essentially, and that is one of the best hands you can have. But let’s say that the community cards are 5-2-2. Now the player holding 2-5 has a much better hand.

Upon reflection, this is more an example of someone who happens to fall into a perfect, matching environment. The analogy that I am going for is that life is really a combination of the cards you are dealt, but more importantly, how you play those cards. Here is a better example:

Let’s say that you are dealt 6-2. Let’s say someone else is dealt King-10, a much better starting hand. The community cards are a King, an Ace, and a 7. But with the way you play your hand, your competitor is sure that you have the Ace, that you have the stronger hand.

I think that this is more of what I’m going for. Sometimes, the cards you’re dealt don’t matter, it’s as simple as that. Life is more about how you play your cards than which cards you’re actually dealt.

You can take this however you want. Take it as a philosophy for life, or take it as a philosophy of religion. I’m not sure that I necessary believe it, but it also makes for a nice resolution to the whole determinism/free-will debate. You can say that life is deterministic in that there are certain qualities with which one is divined at the beginning of life. And these initial conditions do, to a large measure, dictate the winners and losers. But this is by no means absolute.

In our last situation, the player with 6-2 could have made the easy choice to lay down, or fold, his hand at the beginning. Instead he chose to play his shitty cards, but do the best he could with them. Even when the environment didn’t gel well with his starting cards, he still chose to persevere, and play as if he had the winning hand. Thus, there is determinism in there, to satisfy those who have a more traditional belief in God, but the situation is ultimately decided by factors external to not only the starting hand, but external to the environment as well. That should satisfy the humanists among us.

I realize that this is not an airtight proof of some sort. For instance, what is it specifically with which we are imbued at birth, and what factors are ours to control? I don't know if an answer exists to this, but I would hate to have this idea lingering in analogy-land. Oh well, that's for another night.


All in all, I find it amusing that I glean this kind of stuff while sitting around with some of the most dismal people I have ever met. But hey, isn't that what this whole thing is about anyway? I guess it really is more about what you do with the situation than with the situation itself.

Locking the Gates, Losing the War

In "Good Will Hunting," Matt Damon's character says to a Harvard grad student, "In 50 years...you're going to realize that you dropped a hundred and fifty grand on a fuckin education you coulda got for a dollah fifty in late chahges at the public library." Well, sorry Mom, but that's what I'm getting this summer. So, as I sat listening to my professor in "Philosophy of Biology" regurgiate last night's reading, I wrote this:

"Locking the Gates, Losing The War"

After making sense of the news coming in on the morning of July 7th, I opened my window shade, to look out on the Columbia University campus, across 114th Street. The first thing that struck me was that, for the first time since I came to Columbia 2 years ago, the gates on 114th Street were locked. When I asked a security guard why the gates were locked, he said, somewhat nonchalantly, “Because of London.”

As I walked (the long way) to class, it began to dawn on me: terrorism is winning. The only reason we have yet to realize this is because we still measure victories by number of casualties—terrorists don’t. Terrorism is not about the number of people killed; terrorism is about the effect of their actions have on the psyche. In fact, if you look at the origin of the word terrorism, it comes from the Latin word terrere, which means “to frighten,” not “to kill” or “to hurt.” For terrorists, the casualties are just a means to an end. By closing the gates on that Thursday, we opened the flood gates to terrorists.

Beefing up airline security after September 11th was appropriate—there was obviously a need for it, to say the least. But when Columbia security decides that only the gates on 116th Street can be opened, then they are assisting the terrorists in their war, or even admitting defeat. They’re showing, essentially, that the terrorists have fully permeated their minds. Putting more police officers on the sunways was also understandable, since the last two major terrorist attacks were on mass-transit systems. Locking down the Columbia campus was not fitting, as I highly doubt that terrorists have a plan to blow up the stacks in Butler Library.

When tallying up the score for the War on Terrorism, we need to revise our scoring system. By significantly inconveniencing ourselves, we are conceding points to the terrorists. We lose when we allow the threat of terrorism to affect the way we conduct our day-to-day routine. We let terrorists win when we have a visceral reaction.

What we need now is to remember the lessons we learned dealing with the playground bully in 2nd grade. The bully won when we went out of way to avoid the swing-set, or when we went and “told on” him.

Political pundits will continue to tell us that we “live in a different time,” and signs on the highway will continue to flash “Report Any Suspicious Activity.” But just keep in mind that each time we do something like this, we are telling terrorists that what they are doing is working.

How did you get that 2nd grade bully to leave you alone? You ignored him, and his jibes. When he realized that he was no longer having an effect on you, he moved on. But every time you cried, or ran away, he just became worse.

The pundits may be right, we may live in a different time. But by inconveniencing ourselves, and conducting our lives based on fear, we are only giving terrorists another reason to terrorize.