The mind of a poker player is a strange place. You never know what connections you’ll make that nobody outside the game ever would. Just the other day, I was sitting in my local $2/$5 game watching a recreational regular tank for five minutes trying to decide whether to call a 300BB river overbet, and suddenly I’m having a flashback that takes me back a decade ago, staring at the phone, trying to decide if I should call my ex-girlfriend back.
Weird, I know. But there was something about the look in this dude’s eyes. Like he knew he had lost but didn’t want to admit it to himself. I had felt that look. And the one he had on next, like he was trying to find just the right angle to convince himself there was still hope. That it wasn’t all a waste.
Sorry for the spoiler buddy, I remember thinking while watching him, but you’re drawing as dead now as I was with her then.
And just like me, my inner critic made sure to highlight, the sad part is you know that it’s coming.
Eventually, with the sigh only a man who’s made the same mistake far too many times can make, the dude flicked in the call.
I can’t blame him; I did too.
We only lasted a couple of months – my ex and I – after I called her back. Looking at it now, the truth I felt all along, though I didn’t understand it this way for years, was that neither of us was healed enough to make it work. The reasons a relationship fails don’t just disappear because you spend some time apart. But I ignored all the alarm bells going off inside my head and dove back in.
And when it did all fall apart again, this time for good, it was the one that really hurt. Because it was a pain I could have avoided. If only I had listened to myself. I hadn’t trusted my read, and I had paid the price. Just like Mr. Crying Call across the table was about to do.
All eyes turned to the original bettor, an old man who looked like he hadn’t bluffed since industrialization. Each of us at the table, we’d later confirm, expected to see him flip over the nuts. But that’s not what he did.
“Nice call, kid,” were his exact words, which he said while helicoptering his cards into the muck like a grinder a quarter his age.
The table all went nuts obviously. Everyone but the winner himself. I saw no excitement or joy in his face, just the kind of relief you feel when instead of hitting a bottom, life bounces you back up and says: here you go, try it again.
But I wasn’t celebrating with the rest of them either. I’d already seen how this story plays out. I knew this guy just felt the best high of his life, and that if he didn’t make the conscious choice to let it go, he would chase it until it ruined him. Sometimes the luck you think you catch only extends the pain. Because it teaches you to doubt your instincts. And soon, you’re in a hole twice as deep, because you lost the time invested too.
I had to learn those lessons the hard way, as most people do. And now, as my opponent across the table spends month after month paying off one value-bet after another, he will too.
Because that might be the hardest lesson of all: that nobody can fold for you. You have to do it for yourself.
And most people never do.
