Category — Thought-provoking

As many of you know, I love poker.

I can distinctly remember when my father taught me to play. This may date me, but who remembers when LifeSaver Holes were popular? They came in tubes the size of a roll of pennies. Anyway, those were our “stacks”, our chips. We would pull out the trusty TV trays and sit on the couch for hours playing 5 card draw. At the time, I had a problem with eating my own bets. Not so much anymore.

It wasn’t until much later that I began to appreciate the skills my dad had try to teach me at a young age.

During my sophomore year at Ole Miss, the World Series of Poker blew up, and I was introduced to Texas Hold ‘em. A quick run down of Texas Hold ‘em:

Each player is dealt two “hole cards” face down. A round of betting. The dealer turns over 3 community cards that each player can use to better his/her hand. A round of betting. The dealer then turns one card over. A round of betting. Finally, one last community card from the dealer is turned. Final round of betting. Read ‘em and weep.

I’ve played a lot since then. We would play at least once a week in college, and trips to Tunica, MS (local gambling city) weren’t as rare as they should have been.

I’ve won some, I’ve lost some, and most of all I love playing. I think there are a many things that draw me to the game: competition, exhilaration of the win, outsmarting your opponent, odds/probability, and the list goes on.

I wanted to document the play-by-play of a recent online hand (yes I play online poker).

I play poker online occasionally. I played for about 10 days straight when Virginia went out of town for 10 days. I started out around a month ago with a $150 deposit into my favorite site (rhymes with Rodog). I have systematically worked it up to quite a bit of money, and was “sitting at a table” last night where the blinds were $5/$10 – a table that I would never sit at live.

It was a six person table, and the average stack was about $1000. At the time of this hand, I had about $1200. I was on “the button” (was in the dealer position), which means that I’m last to bet in a given round when I was dealt 7d8d (7 of diamonds and 8 of diamonds), which I like. The action went as follows:

First to act folds. Player to his left raises the big blind to $35. Next player folds. I look down at 7d8d and smile, of course I’ll call this. I love calling raises online with mediocre hands like this. I may lose money on the flop when I don’t hit it sets me up perfectly for the situation I’m about to describe. Ok, so I call the $35. The small and big blinds both fold, leaving just the initial raiser, and myself following him.

What do you know? The flop brings 8s-8c-5h. So I’ve got a set of 8s and I’m thinking this guy has a decent hand (AJ-AK, 1010 and greater, etc.), but nothing that can catch up to me. Plus, how could he put me on calling with a single 8 in my hand?! So I’m sitting pretty. He’s first to act, and he takes a while before betting $75. There’s already $85 in the pot, so he’s trying to take it down immediately. I kind of laugh on the inside. I quickly call the $75 to try to play like I have something, (reverse psychology). The next card was probably the best card in the deck for me. It was the king of clubs. So on the board, we have 8s-8c-5h-Kc. It’s his turn to bet again. He waits maybe 5 seconds after the king fell before betting $185. So there is $235 in the pot when he bet $185. As I said before, this is a great card for a couple of reasons: (1.) If he has something like Ace-King, it allows him to hit his top-pair, (2.) if I raise, it looks like I have a king and he may call just to try to split the pot now that it’s so big. SO. I decide to raise to represent a king, thinking that surely he can at least tie a king. I raise to $695. This means that there is now $1115 in the pot. He waits for a long time (~30 seconds) before re-raising me all in for ~$200 more. At this point, I figure the only thing that can beat me is KK and, there is a slim chance (albeit very real with online poker) that he indeed has that. I mull over it for 0.5 seconds before calling the extra $200. That $200 call made the pot $2025! Low and behold, I played it just right – he flipped over AA. Pocket aces are a loser when I’m calling with 78 suited! The river was 10s; so he shipped all of his chips over for the $2025 victory.

The best part about this wasn’t the money. It was the fact that I outplayed and outsmarted that guy. I called when it didn’t cost me much, hit, and then played like I didn’t. I then raised precisely when I should have, (AA would love to see someone raise when a King hits), to take it to the bank.

That is why I love the game. It’s all in the head.

As many of you know, I enjoy reading books. In order to enjoy reading a book, you must start a book. I start many books at the same time, and therefore never finish a book. Therefore, one could say that I don’t enjoy finishing books. At any rate, I am currently reading the first in C.S. Lewis’ space trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet.

In a conscious effort not to expose the fact that I’m dumb, I’ll avoid addressing the underlying symbolism and parallels that one is supposed to draw from this novel. Instead, I’ll type – verbatim – that which I found extremely interesting and thought provoking. First, a little background:

Ransom is the protagonist, a human.
He is conversing with a sorn, who is a creature on another planet.
Ransom is trying to find ‘Oyarsa’, an eldila, who might be symbolic of God or an angel, etc.
Ransom is asking the sorn, who is very knowledgeable, about who or what Oyarsa is.
In response to Ransom’s questions, the sorn gives this answer to the nature of why [we humans] can’t fully grasp the supernatural here on earth.

Ransom: “Not that I know of. But what are eldila, and why can I not see them? Have they no bodies?”
Sorn: “Of course they have bodies. There are a great many bodies you cannot see. Every animal’s eyes see some things but not others. …”

Ransom tried to give the sorn some idea of the terrestrial terminology of solids, liquids, and gases. It listened with great attention. ‘That is not the way to say it,’ it replied. ‘Body is movement. If it is at one speed, you smell something; if at another you hear a sound; if at another you see a sight; if at another, you neither see nor hear nor smell, nor know the body in any way. But mark this [Ransom], that the two ends meet.’
R: “How do you mean?”
S: “If movement is faster, then that which moves is more nearly in two places at once.”
R: “That is true.”
S: “But if the movement were faster still – it is difficult, for you do not know many words – you see that if you made it faster and faster, in the end the moving thing would be in all places at once…”
R: “I think I see that.”
S: “Well, then, that is the thing at the top of all bodies – so fast that it is at rest, so truly body that it has ceased being body at all. But we will not talk of that. Start from where we are, [Ransom]. The swiftest thing that touches our senses is light. We do not truly see light, we only see slower things lit by it, so that for us light is on the edge – the last thing we know before things become too swift for us. But the body of an eldila is a movement swift as light; you may say its body is made of light, but not of that which is light for the eldil. His “light” is a swifter movement which for us is nothing at all; and what we call light is for him a thing like water, a visible thing, a thing he can touch and bathe in – even a dark thing when not illuminated by the swifter. And what we call firm things – flesh and earth – seem to him thinner, and harder to see, than our light, and more like clouds, and nearly nothing. To us the eldil is a thin, half-real body that can go through walls and rocks: to himself he goes through them because he is solid and firm and they are like a cloud. And what is true light to him and fills the heaven, so that he will plunge into the rays of the sun to refresh himself from it, is to us the black nothing in the sky at night. These things are not strange, [Ransom], though they are beyond our senses…

A very intriguing idea. I guess that’s why I like reading his stuff so much. It is so great, full of new ideas and thought projects. Just thought I should post because I’ve been thinking about it ever since I read it a couple days ago.