November 7, 2026

The lessons we can learn from the game of Poker

Every poker room has two kinds of players, and you can tell them apart by midnight. One is playing with somewhere to be in the morning — a life outside the card room that keeps his judgment clean and his stack protected. The other is playing because he has nowhere in particular to be at all, and it shows: he stays too long, chases hands out of boredom, and treats his chips as a way to pass the hours rather than as something entrusted to him. The cards do not know the difference between these two men. Over the years, their bodies will. It turns out having a purpose — a reason — is not merely good for the soul. Measured carefully, it appears to be good for survival itself.

That is not a preacher’s claim; it is a researcher’s. In a study published in 2019, scientists followed thousands of Americans over the age of fifty and measured, among other things, each person’s sense of purpose: the feeling that one’s life has direction and meaning, that there are goals worth getting up for. Then they watched who died during the study period. The result was stark. Those with the lowest sense of purpose were significantly more likely to die during those years than those with the highest — and the gap remained even after the researchers accounted for the obvious explanations: existing health, wealth, depression, and the rest. A weak sense of purpose was not merely a symptom of a life going badly. It traveled with mortality itself.

Researchers are still working out the mechanism, and their leading explanations are plain ones. A person with a purpose takes better care of the machine: he keeps the doctor’s appointment, takes the walk, eats as if it matters, because he has somewhere to be and people expecting him. Purpose pulls a person outward — into volunteering, family, congregation, and community — and social engagement is itself protective. It gives stress somewhere to go; a bad day is only weather inside a life that has a direction. Strip the science down and it sounds too simple to publish: people who have a reason to live, live longer. But simple is not the same as easy. A reason, once the job stops supplying one automatically, has to be found and kept — deliberately, the way you keep anything else that keeps you alive.

That word — kept — is the one to hold onto. We do not treat our other health habits as matters of inspiration. Nobody with sense says, “I will take my blood pressure medicine when I feel moved to,” or “I will walk on the days the mood strikes.” We schedule those things, build them into the week, and keep them on the flat days as faithfully as on the good ones, precisely because the benefit comes from the keeping. Purpose belongs on the same list, handled with the same unsentimental regularity. It is not a lightning bolt to wait for in retirement. It is a habit to practice: something to contribute, someone to help, something to build or learn, returned to week after week the way you return to the walking route and the pill organizer.

And it does not have to be grand — this is where most people excuse themselves, and they should not. In my years of practice and since, the purposes that held up were rarely impressive on paper. One man tutored children at the library two mornings a week and guarded those mornings like court dates. A woman kept a garden that fed half her street. Another wrote out the family history nobody else would ever have recorded; another gave herself fully to her grandchildren; another lent her bookkeeping skills to a small charity that would have folded without them. What they share is not scale. It is that each was genuinely theirs, reached beyond themselves, and gave the week a spine. The research does not ask whether your purpose would impress a stranger. It asks whether you have one.

Here is the takeaway. This week, write your purpose in a single sentence — not a wish, a sentence, beginning “I am the person who…” — and then do for it what you do for every other health habit that matters. Give it fixed appointments in your calendar, at least two a week, and keep them for a month the way you would keep a prescription. When you next sit down to review your health — the weight, the blood pressure, the lab numbers — add one more line to the page: purpose, present and practiced, or missing. The researchers have done their part; they have shown a reason to get up in the morning is not a luxury of a good retirement. It is one of its medicines.

The sweetest word in a poker player’s vocabulary might be “freeroll.”

A freeroll is a tournament that costs you nothing to enter and pays out money to win. No buy-in. No risk. Somebody else — the house, a sponsor, a promotion — has put up the prize pool, and all you have to do is show up and play. In a business built on charging for every seat, the freeroll is the one genuine free lunch, and players who would haggle over a five-dollar side bet line up for one like kids at an ice cream truck.

But here’s the strange part, and any tournament director will confirm it: watch how people play a freeroll, then watch how they play the event they paid three hundred dollars to enter, and you will see two different species of human being.

The man who bought in plays like money matters, because it does — his money. He folds the marginal hands. He waits. He protects his stack like it has his name on it, because it does. The freeroll player, an hour into a tournament that cost him nothing, is calling all-ins with a gutshot draw and a dream, laughing when he busts out, because busting out cost him nothing either. He didn’t play badly because he’s a bad player. He played badly because nothing he was holding had cost him anything — and human beings value things in rough proportion to what they paid for them.

It’s the great leak in the freeroll: a free seat gets played like a free seat. Given a stack we didn’t buy, we treat the stack as worthless — even though the prizes at the end are just as real, and just as spendable, as the ones in the paid event across the room. The chips are identical. The final table is identical. The check is identical. Only the entry fee was different, and the entry fee is the one thing that has nothing to do with what the seat is worth.

Casinos understand this about us, which is why the freeroll exists at all. And we’ve all been the man who throws a gifted seat away — because in cards and out of them, the things that arrive free are the things we handle carelessly: the open afternoon, the healthy year, the people who’d forgive us before we asked. Not because they’re worth less. Because we never saw a price tag, we assume there isn’t one.

Now consider a story about a landowner who ran his payroll like a freeroll — and the riot it caused among the men who’d paid full price.

He hired workers for his vineyard at dawn, at the standard wage: a full day’s pay for a full day’s work, agreed and fair. Then he went back at nine, and again at noon, and again at three, and hired the men still standing there, promising to pay them whatever was right. And at five o’clock — one hour before quitting time — he hired the last of them, men who’d stood idle all day because nobody had picked them.

At sundown he paid them in reverse order. The one-hour men went first, and each received a full day’s wage. The dawn crew, doing the arithmetic any of us would do, brightened: if that’s the rate for an hour, imagine the rate for twelve. Then they got exactly what they’d agreed to that morning. One day’s wage. Not a coin less than the bargain — and not a coin more than the men who’d barely broken a sweat.

They were furious, and the owner’s answer is the whole story in two questions: “Friend, I do thee no wrong: didst not thou agree with me for a penny?… Is thine eye evil, because I am good?”

Nobody was cheated. Everybody got what was promised. What the dawn crew couldn’t stand was that the seat next to them had been given away free — that the last men in were treated as if they’d belonged there all along. “So the last shall be first,” the storyteller concluded, “and the first last.”

I’ve sat with that story the way I’ve sat with the freeroll, because they’re the same story told from opposite ends of the table. The paid players resenting the free seat. And underneath it, a harder thought: that the best seat I’ve ever held — the one I think of as mine by right, by work, by showing up at dawn — might itself have been a gift before it was anything else. In the one accounting that finally matters, none of us bought in. We were dealt in.

The freeroll isn’t worthless because it’s free. A seat you didn’t pay for can still be the most valuable seat in the room. Ask the men hired at five o’clock: they played an hour and went home paid in full, and the only men unhappy about it were the ones keeping score by the wrong column.

Take your seat. It cost you nothing. That was never the same as it being worth nothing.

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The lessons we can learn from the game of Poker

Sit with an old poker player sometime and ask him about the players of his grandfather’s generation, and he will tell you something interesting: most of them never got to play a late game at all. They sat down at life’s table, worked their stack through the earning years, and were still working it — still owing the table their days — when their health gave out and the chair was pulled away. There was no stretch of hands played for pleasure after the must-win years. There was the game you had to play, and then, fairly soon after it ended, the end. What our generation has been handed, without much noticing it, is something those players never saw: a long run of extra hands, dealt after the obligations are finished, to people still strong enough to play them well.

The British historian Peter Laslett gave those extra hands a name. Writing in the late 1980s, he divided a human life into four ages. The first age is childhood and schooling. The second is the long age of work and raising a family — the age most of us have just completed. The fourth, at the very end, is the age of dependency and decline, when the body narrows our choices whether we like it or not. And between the second age and the fourth, Laslett placed a third: a season of life made possible only recently by longer and healthier lives, in which a person is free of the old obligations — no employer, no children at home — yet still healthy, capable, and in full possession of his powers. Laslett did not describe the third age as a wind-down. He called it, potentially, the crown of life.

Sit with the arithmetic for a moment, because it deserves a moment. For most of human history, the third age barely existed; the second age ran straight into the fourth, work into decline, with perhaps a brief and tired pause in between. Today a healthy sixty-five-year-old can reasonably expect the third age to last fifteen, twenty, even twenty-five years. That is not an epilogue. That is a span as long as the entire career many people spent in a single job — a second full act of adult life, except that this time nobody hands you the script. Your parents did not model it for you, because most of them never had it. You are among the first generations in history asked to decide what this season is for.

And a season that long deserves better than leftovers. I watched clients come into my office with meticulous plans for the second age — the savings, the insurance, the wills, all in order — and no plan at all for the third, beyond a vague hope that it would fill itself in. Mostly it did not, or it filled with whatever wandered by: the television, the errands, the slow drift of days that all look alike. Poker teaches the same lesson from the other side. A player who is dealt a deep stack and extra time at the table, with no idea what he is trying to accomplish, will not keep either for long. Chips without a plan leak away in small, unconsidered bets. Years do exactly the same.

What makes the third age a crown is not simply that it is free. It is that it is the first season of life that can be designed rather than inherited. The first age was arranged by your parents. The second was arranged, mostly, by necessity — the bills, the children, the mortgage had votes you could not override. The third age is the first one in which the honest question is not “What must I do?” but “What is this for?” Learning, travel, service, craft, family, faith — the menu is finally yours to choose from. That freedom is a genuine gift, and like most real gifts it asks something of the person who receives it: that he treat it as the main event it is, and not as a waiting room for the fourth age.

Here is the takeaway. This week, do two pieces of arithmetic and one piece of writing. First, subtract your age from eighty-five — or ninety, if your family runs long — and look honestly at how many third-age years you likely hold. Second, notice that you would never let a sum of money that size sit unplanned, yet most of us let exactly that many years sit. Then take one page and write the plan this season deserves: what it is for, what a good week inside it contains, and one thing from that page you will begin this month. Earlier generations were never dealt this hand. You have been. Play it like the crown it is.

Business is like the game of Poker

Warren Buffett is, by any honest accounting, the most successful investor who ever lived. So when the man tells you his success began with a lottery he did not enter and could not have won on merit, it is worth putting down whatever you are holding and listening. Buffett calls it the ovarian lottery — and he does not mean it as a joke at his own expense. He means it as the foundation of everything else he thinks.

His version runs like this. Imagine that the person you are about to become could be drawn, by lottery, from anyone on earth — any country, any century’s circumstances, any body, any mind. Buffett drew a winning ticket: born in the United States in 1930, in a stable home, with a particular kind of brain that happened to be exquisitely suited to capital allocation in a market economy. Now run the counterfactual he insists on running. Put that same mind in another place or time — a farming village in 1830, a country with no functioning markets — and it accomplishes nothing remarkable at all. The talent does not change. The table does. And nobody earns the table he is born to.

Hear what Buffett is not saying. He is not saying skill is an illusion, or that his record is a coin flip, or that the decades of discipline — the reading, the patience, the refusal of a thousand tempting mistakes — were decoration. He compounded money at rates no one matched, over a span no one matched, and he did it awake and on purpose. He is saying something narrower and harder: the skill was his, but the opportunity to use it was dealt. A man can be the finest poker player of his generation and still win nothing in a town with no game.

That Buffett says this, plainly and often, is one of the reasons his judgment deserves trust. Because the player who cannot see his own good cards will misjudge everything else at the table — and the misjudgments follow a predictable order. First, he misjudges himself: he reads his winnings as proof of pure skill, and skill he believes is pure becomes arrogance, and arrogance at the Big Table is the most expensive habit there is. Second, he misjudges his opponents: he looks across at the man dealt a worse hand — worse schools, worse timing, worse country — who is playing it brilliantly and staying even, and he mistakes that man’s smaller stack for lesser ability. Third, and most dangerous of all, he makes the assumption that quietly ruins strong players in every generation: he assumes the cards will keep coming. The tailwind that carried him feels like weather that belongs to him. It never did. It can stop on the very next hand, and the player who never knew it was there will have no idea what stopped.

I watched this in my own practice for thirty years, in a smaller arena. The developer who caught a rising market in his first five years and concluded he was a genius, and leveraged accordingly, and was gone by the second downturn. The heir who received a well-built business and treated its advantages as permanent features of the landscape, like the weather, right up until a competitor took them. In every case the hands were real and the players were not fools. They simply never separated what they had earned from what they had been dealt — and so they defended the wrong thing, and neglected the right one, and called the result bad luck when the deck turned.

The practical use of the ovarian lottery is not humility as decoration. It is accounting. A serious player sorts his position into two columns: what the deal gave him, and what he built on top of it. The first column he holds with gratitude and defends without illusion, knowing it can erode. The second column — the discipline, the reputation, the knowledge earned hand by hand — is the part that is actually his, and the part he must keep building, because it is the only part that survives a change in the deal.

Here is the takeaway. Draw the two columns on one page. In the left column, list what you were dealt: your country, your era, your health, your education, the family and timing that put you where you started. In the right column, list what you have genuinely built on top of it. Then ask the question Buffett’s honesty forces: if the left column stopped paying tomorrow, would the right column hold you? If the answer is thin, you have found your real work. Thank the lottery for the cards. Then go earn the part of the hand that nobody dealt you.

Business is like the game of Poker

Every poker player knows the feeling of looking down at pocket aces. You did nothing to earn them. The deck simply delivered, and before a single chip has moved, you are playing a different game from the man holding a seven and a deuce. The rules are identical for both of you. The hands are not. Business works the same way, and no life proves it more cleanly — or more honestly — than Bill Gates’s.

In 1968, the Mothers’ Club at Lakeside School, a private school in Seattle, held a rummage sale. With the proceeds, the mothers bought computer time for the students: a teletype terminal in a small room, connected by telephone line to a distant mainframe. Understand what that meant in 1968. Almost no one in America had access to a computer. Universities rationed it. Corporations guarded it. And in a school in Seattle, a thirteen-year-old boy could sit down in front of one, in his spare hours, for as long as he could stay.

Gates stayed. He and his friend Paul Allen spent every hour they could manufacture at that terminal, learning by doing what could not be learned from any book, because the field was too new to have books. By the time the two of them founded Microsoft in 1975, Gates had logged thousands of programming hours. Put that number in perspective: he had an experience base, before he was old enough to vote, that almost no one alive on earth could match — not because he was the only brilliant teenager in America, but because he was nearly the only teenager in America with a terminal. Other brilliant boys were out there in 1968, thousands of them. They were holding seven-deuce. He was holding aces, and the rummage sale had dealt them.

There was a second card, quieter than the first. Gates’s family was prosperous and connected, and his mother, Mary Gates, served on the national board of the United Way — alongside John Opel, a senior IBM executive who later became IBM’s chairman. When IBM needed an operating system for its first personal computer in 1980 and came calling on a small, young software company, that connection is often cited as one reason IBM’s leadership was comfortable taking the meeting. A mother’s volunteer board seat became, twelve years later, a card worth billions.

Now — the part of this story that matters most, because lazy readers get it wrong. The cards do not diminish what Gates did, and this book will not pretend otherwise. Thousands of people in his generation had prosperous families and good schools. Several students had access to that same terminal. Almost nobody combined the advantage with his intensity, his technical brilliance, and his strategic vision. Aces can be misplayed; ask anyone who has watched a fortune inherited and spent by the third generation. Gates played his hand about as well as a hand can be played. That is on him.

But the cards were real, and the honest player admits it — Gates himself has spoken openly about how lucky he was in the timing and circumstances of his beginning. That honesty is not modesty. It is accuracy, and accuracy is a competitive weapon. The player who believes he earned his aces will misread the whole table: he will overrate his skill, underrate the opponent who is beating him with worse cards, and make plans that assume the deck owes him a living. The player who knows he was dealt well plays differently. He feels the weight of the advantage. He works to deserve it after the fact.

Most of us were not dealt a terminal in 1968. Fine. The exercise this story demands is not envy — it is inventory. Every player reading this was dealt something: a trade learned young, a town that happened to grow, a parent in an industry, a mind that runs toward numbers or toward people. Most of those cards go unplayed for a lifetime simply because their owner never looked down and counted them, the way fish never notice water.

Here is the takeaway. Take a sheet of paper and write down the cards you were actually dealt — the access, the timing, the people, the head start, whatever they were — without modesty and without apology. Then write down, beside each one, whether you have ever deliberately played it. Gates’s genius was real, but it began with a rummage sale. The difference between him and a thousand equally gifted boys was partly the deal — and partly that when the terminal appeared, he sat down and stayed there. Your aces are already in front of you. Play them like you know what they’re worth.

What poker can teach us about relationships

Every poker room has one: the player who folds hand after hand, waiting for cards so good that playing them requires no courage at all. Meanwhile the antes and blinds come around like rent, and his stack quietly shrinks whether he plays or not. He believes he is being careful. What he is actually doing is losing slowly, at a price he has chosen not to notice, in exchange for never having to risk losing quickly. I have met that player far more often across my desk than at any card table, explaining, reasonably and at length, why he was not yet in the game.

His reasons always sound like wisdom, and that is what makes them so hard to argue with. He is afraid of losing his freedom, and freedom is a real thing to value: the spontaneous trip, the career gamble, the life that answers to no one. He is afraid of choosing wrong, and choosing a spouse is the least reversible decision most of us ever make. He is afraid of repeating his parents’ mistakes — he sat at their table, he watched their marriage, and he swore his would be different or would not be at all. And he is afraid of being hurt, the plainest fear of the four. None of these fears is foolish. Each is a true fact about the game, quoted back as a reason never to sit down at it.

Let me concede what my profession taught me: some hesitation really is wisdom. I spent a career drafting wills and sitting with families — and with the wreckage of commitments made for the wrong reasons. The man who marries to escape loneliness has not paid an ante; he has made a desperate bet and asked another person to cover it. The couple who has a child to repair a failing marriage has done something worse — dealt a third player into a game they were already losing. Thoughtfulness about the largest commitment of a life is not fear. It is respect for the stakes.

But fear has a tell, and once you see it you cannot unsee it. Wisdom names its conditions. It can tell you what it is waiting for — debts paid down, a degree finished, a year of knowing this person in all four seasons — and when those conditions are met, it acts. Fear cannot do that. Ask fear what would finally satisfy it and the answer shifts: the savings are adequate now, but the job is not quite secure; the job is secure, but shouldn’t we travel first, while we still can? The goalposts move because moving them was always the point. Fear is not waiting for better cards. It is protecting itself from the one thing cards are for.

And the protection is not free, because life collects its ante whether you play or not. The years a man spends waiting for certainty are spent all the same — in the currency of youth, of fertility, of parents still living, of the good person across the table who eventually stops waiting to be chosen. A stack folded down to nothing looks exactly like a stack lost in one brave hand, except the brave hand at least had a chance to win. Only one of those two players ever held a winning pot.

I do not say this to shame the hesitant; the fears are usually guarding something worth examining rather than obeying. The fear of repeating a parent’s marriage, looked at honestly, is often the beginning of a better one — the people I watched build strong families out of broken ones were not the ones who avoided the table, but the ones who studied the hand they were raised in and played theirs deliberately. The fear of choosing wrong is answered not by waiting for a flawless person, who has not been born, but by watching how a real one handles conflict and disappointment. Even the fear of being hurt admits the truth it tries to hide: the hurt is possible precisely because the prize is real.

Here is the takeaway. If you have been standing at the edge of this game, do the honest inventory: write down what you are actually waiting for, in specific terms, and ask whether wisdom or fear wrote the list. If the items are real, meet them and set a date. If the list rewrites itself every time you approach it, name what is happening — and then do the thing fear least expects: pay the ante with your eyes open, accepting that some risk is not the obstacle to a family’s life but the price of admission to it. The player who waits endlessly for perfect cards waits forever. The cards were never going to be perfect. They only had to be worth playing.

As employees start requesting time off for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s, it’s a good time for California employers to revisit the state’s unusual rules on vacation and paid time off (PTO). California does not require employers to offer paid vacation at all, but once an employer does, the benefit is treated as earned wages and is tightly regulated under Labor Code section 227.3 and the California Supreme Court’s decision in Suastez v. Plastic Dress-Up Co. (1982).

This year’s update matters for one reason in particular: a new law signed on September 30, 2026 changes how employers can handle PTO advanced to employees who later quit, starting January 1, 2027 — right in the middle of the holiday season. Here are five vacation issues California employers should have on their radar this December.

1. “Use-it-or-lose-it” policies are still prohibited — and “PTO” or “unlimited” labels don’t change that.

Under California law, vacation vests as the employee works, so an employee cannot be required to forfeit vacation that has already been earned. A policy that wipes out unused balances on December 31 (or before the holidays) is unlawful.

Two common workarounds don’t avoid the rule:

• Combined PTO plans. The Labor Commissioner treats a PTO bank that can be used for any purpose — vacation, sick time, or personal days — as vacation. PTO vests daily, cannot be forfeited, and must be paid out at separation. (Standalone paid sick leave under Labor Code section 246 generally does not have to be paid out, but once sick time is folded into a general PTO bank, it is treated like vacation.)
• “Unlimited” vacation. In McPherson v. EF Intercultural Foundation, Inc. (2020), the Court of Appeal held that an informal “unlimited” policy that was not unlimited in practice was subject to section 227.3, and the employer owed vacation payouts. The court did not hold that truly unlimited policies are unlawful, but an unwritten or loosely administered policy is risky.

If the goal is to keep balances from growing year after year, there are lawful options: a reasonable accrual cap (Point 2) or an annual cash-out of unused vacation, which the Labor Commissioner has recognized as permissible.

2. Reasonable caps — and holiday scheduling — are your management tools.

Employers may adopt a “no additional accrual” cap: once an employee’s balance reaches a set ceiling, no more vacation accrues until the employee uses some of it. The cap must be reasonable, and it must be clearly described in the written policy.

What counts as “reasonable”? There is no statutory number. The DLSE previously took the position that a cap of 1.75 times the annual accrual was appropriate, but it later withdrew that opinion. Many employers now set caps between 1.5 and 2 times annual accrual. The Labor Commissioner’s guidance also states that employees should have at least nine months after vacation accrues to use it before a cap takes effect. A cap equal to one year’s accrual will usually be treated as a disguised use-it-or-lose-it policy.

Employers also have more control over when vacation is taken than many realize. The Labor Commissioner recognizes that employers may decide when vacation can be used and how much can be taken at one time. That means an employer can generally:

• Set blackout periods during the busiest weeks of the holiday season;
• Limit the number of employees off at the same time; and
• Schedule a year-end closure and require employees to use accrued vacation during it, provided the policy is clear and employees receive reasonable advance notice.

3. Accrued vacation must be paid out when employment ends — including during seasonal furloughs.

Earned, unused vacation must be paid at the employee’s final rate of pay as part of the final paycheck under Labor Code sections 201, 202, and 227.3. Missing the deadline can trigger waiting time penalties under Labor Code section 203 of up to 30 days of wages.

For restaurants, hotels, retailers, and other employers that adjust staffing after the holidays, the timing rule is a trap. In Hartstein v. Hyatt Corp. (9th Cir. 2023), the Ninth Circuit agreed with the Labor Commissioner that a temporary layoff or furlough without a specific return date within the normal pay period is a “discharge,” so all final wages — including accrued vacation — are due immediately. What the employer calls the separation doesn’t matter.

If you plan a January slowdown, either give employees a firm return date within the same pay period or be prepared to issue final pay, including vacation, on the day the furlough begins. (For more on getting final pay right, see our post, Key Issues Every California Employer Must Get Right When Terminating an Employee.)

4. Negative balances still cannot be deducted from final pay — but a new repayment option arrives January 1, 2027.

The holidays are when employees most often ask to borrow against vacation they haven’t earned yet. The Labor Commissioner treats advanced vacation as an advance of wages. If the employee leaves before earning it back, the employer cannot deduct the negative balance from the final paycheck. Self-help recovery from final wages is unlawful under Barnhill v. Robert Saunders & Co. (1981), and the deduction can also lead to waiting time penalties.

What’s new is that California’s “stay-or-pay” law now creates a narrow path to recover some advanced PTO. AB 692, enacted in 2025, generally bars employment contracts that require workers to repay money when their employment ends. On September 30, 2026, Governor Newsom signed AB 1697, which delayed AB 692 so it applies only to contracts entered into on or after January 1, 2027. AB 1697 also added an exception for repaying advanced PTO if all of the following conditions are met:

• The employee voluntarily separates (the exception does not apply when the employer ends the relationship);
• The repayment terms are clearly disclosed in writing, separate from the primary employment contract, at the time the employee requests the advance;
• The repayment obligation does not exceed 40 hours of PTO; and
• No interest accrues.

Two cautions. First, the exception permits a repayment obligation. It does not authorize an automatic deduction from final wages, so the Barnhill rule still applies and recovery must come through a voluntary repayment or a separate collection effort. Second, any repayment arrangement for advances above 40 hours, or one that doesn’t meet each condition, risks violating the stay-or-pay statute once it takes effect, with exposure of actual damages or $5,000 per worker (whichever is greater), plus attorney’s fees.

Practically, employers that allow vacation advances should update their advance-request form before January 1 so that any request made in the new year includes the separate written disclosure. Many employers will decide that simply capping advances at 40 hours is the cleanest approach.

5. Waiting periods are lawful; disguised “cliff vesting” is not.

Employers may adopt a waiting period at the start of employment during which no vacation is earned. California courts have upheld waiting periods of six months and even one year when the policy is clear. Owen v. Macy’s, Inc. (2009); Minnick v. Automotive Creations, Inc. (2017). An employee who leaves during a valid waiting period is not owed vacation pay.

The risk comes when a policy looks like a waiting period but actually rewards the waiting period after the fact. The Labor Commissioner will treat a plan as a “subterfuge” if the first post-waiting-period grant is inflated to make up for the waiting period — for example, no vacation in year one, four weeks in year two, and two weeks in year three. In that situation, the Labor Commissioner treats the vacation as having been earned during year one, and employees who leave early are owed prorated vacation at their final rate.

The safer formulation is a clearly worded policy stating that no vacation is earned or accrues during the waiting period, followed by accrual that begins after the waiting period ends and does not “catch up” for the time already worked.

California’s vacation rules are stricter than federal law and those of most other states, and the holidays are when they get tested — advance requests, year-end balances, shutdowns, and post-season staffing changes all land at once. (Remember, too, that California does not require holiday pay or premium pay for working on a holiday, unless the employer’s own policy promises it.) A quick review of your vacation policy, cap language, and advance-request forms now can prevent costly wage claims in the new year. For a broader overview of these rules, see our earlier post, Navigating California’s Unique Vacation Laws.

The post California Vacation Laws for the Holidays: What Employers Need to Know (2026 Update) appeared first on California Employment Law Report.

What poker can teach us about relationships

The researchers will hand you a puzzle. In survey after survey, parents — especially parents of young children — report more daily stress and less moment-to-moment pleasure than people without children. The days are longer, the tempers shorter, the pleasures thinner and more frequently interrupted. And yet many of those same exhausted people describe their children as the greatest source of meaning in their lives. Both answers are honest. They are simply answers to different questions, and confusing the two questions has misled many people standing at the edge of the biggest decision of their lives.

The confusion is understandable, because pleasure and meaning are tallied on different scoreboards. Pleasure is measured hand by hand: Was this hour enjoyable? Was this evening relaxing? Parenthood loses a great many of those hands, and it is pointless to pretend otherwise. The diaper at midnight, the argument over homework, the vacation that becomes an expedition — any honest parent will concede the count. Meaning is measured over the whole game: What is your life about? What would you not trade away? On that scoreboard, the same parent who lost the evening wins going away, and knows it, and cannot explain it to anyone keeping the first scoreboard.

Poker players understand this arithmetic. A fine player can lose most of the hands in a session — folding, waiting, absorbing losses hour after hour — and leave the table a winner, because the hands he won were the ones that mattered and the pot he built was worth more than the antes that drained away. Judge him by any single hour and he looks like a loser. Judge him by the night, and the year, and the story is reversed. Parenthood is the extreme version of that session. The daily antes are real, relentless, and mostly unglamorous. The pot is something else entirely: a person, becoming himself in front of you, who loves you with a completeness you did nothing to deserve and can do nothing to purchase.

That last part is the heart of the paradox, so let me say it plainly: what the ante buys cannot be bought any other way. There is no market where meaning of this kind is sold separately. You cannot hire it, inherit it, or win it. The chance to love someone more than yourself and be loved back in the currency of trust; the chance to shape a life — to be the voice a grown man still hears when he decides who to be; the chance to see the world made new through a child’s eyes, the first snowfall and the first lost tooth arriving with the force of revelation — all of it is available at one price, and the price is the daily one, paid in stress and sleeplessness and surrendered pleasures. The paradox dissolves once you see that the two columns were never measuring the same thing.

I saw the final tally of this paradox at the end of my cases, in the rooms where a life gets summed up. People reviewing their years with a lawyer — signing the documents, deciding what goes to whom — do not talk about their pleasant afternoons. They talk about their children: the ones they are proud of, the ones they worry over still, the ones they hope to see before the end. In hospital corridors and at more bedsides than I can count, I never once heard a dying person ask for their portfolio. They asked for their kids. Whatever the daily ledger said, the lifetime ledger was not close.

An honest caution belongs here: meaning is not a synonym for happiness, and no one should be sold parenthood as a pleasure strategy; the paradox is a description, not an advertisement. There are hard seasons when the meaning itself runs quiet and all a parent can feel is the cost. The research tells us most parents, given the whole of it to judge, judge the bargain worth making — and that the question to ask beforehand is not “will this make my days more pleasant?” but “is this the meaning I want my life to carry?”

Here is the takeaway. If you are a parent in the thick of the expensive years, learn to keep the right scoreboard. On the days when the daily count is all loss — no sleep, no peace, no minute that was yours — resist grading your life by that column. Ask instead the whole-game question: what in my life would I trade this for? Most parents find the answer arrives quickly. And if you are deciding whether to become a parent, decide on the meaning column, with your eyes open about the pleasure column. The highest ante at the family table buys the one thing money, leisure, and freedom cannot. Most of us who paid it would pay it again.

Business is like the game of Poker

Ask a professional poker player what the first few hands of a session are for and he will give you an answer that sounds like a confession: he is not really trying to win them. He is buying information. He plays a small pot to see who is timid, who is bluffing, who protects his blinds and who gives them away. The chips he risks early are not a gamble; they are an expense — the cheapest education in the room. The amateur believes every hand is a verdict on his talent; the professional knows the early hands are a purchase, decided in advance.

That is the correct frame for the first stage of any business, and it changes everything about how the money should be spent. Treat the ante as tuition. A tuition payment is not judged by whether it makes you rich; it is judged by whether you learned what you paid to learn. The founder who grasps this stops asking the first stage to prove he was right — a demand that makes him hide bad news, massage results, and defend a theory long after the table has refuted it. Instead he asks the first stage a better question: where, exactly, am I wrong? Because he is wrong somewhere. Every plan is. The only choices are whether he finds out at the price of a first shipment or at the price of a warehouse.

The titans’ early hands read like coursework once you know to look. Knight’s first shipments taught him that runners would pay for a better shoe long before any retailer believed it — a fact no survey could have sold him, learned for the price of one order of Tigers. Blakely’s mill visits taught her that expertise was a gate, not a verdict, and that the way through it ran around the experts. Each lesson arrived attached to a modest bill, and each one rewrote the next bet. That is tuition working as intended: small payments, specific knowledge, immediate application — the opposite of the founder who spends two years and six figures discovering everything that was wrong.

But tuition only teaches if it is paid with your eyes open, and eyes open is a discipline, not a mood. Before the money goes in, write three things down. First, what this ante costs — the whole, honest figure, in dollars and in months. Second, what it could teach: the specific unknowns this hand exists to resolve. Will customers pay this price? Will this supplier perform? Does this neighborhood buy what I am building? Third, what you will do if it is lost — decided in advance, in calm, for the moment when you will be neither. One page holds all three. It is the least impressive document in business and the one whose absence I have seen cost the most.

The reason for the page is what happens to players who skip it. A man who has not defined his loss in advance does not experience losing it as information; he experiences it as a theft that must be recovered. So he doubles the next bet to win it back, then doubles again, and one hand’s tuition becomes a stack-destroying chase. Casinos are built on that man. Lenders retire on him. In my years of practice I reviewed the wreckage of ventures that did not die of a bad idea. They died of an undefined loss, chased by good people who had never decided in advance what they would do when the first hand went wrong.

Notice the freedom on the other side of the page. The player who knows his cost, his questions, and his exit can play the hand in front of him with something close to relaxation. He is not negotiating with himself mid-crisis, and his judgment stays his own — the asset the whole exercise exists to protect, because the ante buys information, but judgment, exercised over many hands, is what turns information into a business.

Here is the takeaway. Before you pay your next first bet — a shipment, a prototype, a single lot, a pilot customer — take one page and write the three lines: what it costs, what it is meant to teach, and what you will do if it is lost. Then pay the ante and study the hand like a student who has paid for the lesson and intends to get it. The goal of the first stage is not to prove you were right. It is to find out where you were wrong while finding out is still cheap. Every titan in this book paid that tuition. The ones we never heard of paid the same money and refused the lesson — which is the only way an ante is ever truly wasted.

What poker can teach us about relationships

Every parent has heard the number, usually from a magazine or a well-meaning relative: the United States Department of Agriculture, in its last major estimate, calculated that a middle-income couple would spend more than two hundred thousand dollars raising a child born in 2015 through age seventeen — and that figure leaves out college entirely, and prices have climbed since. It is a sobering sum. It is also, as any parent past the first year can tell you, the smallest part of the price. If money were the whole ante for a child, parenthood would be a purchase. It is not. It is a payment made in currencies no bank tracks, collected daily, for decades.

The first currency is sleep. New parents walk through the early years in a fog that no coffee fully lifts: the two o’clock feeding, the four o’clock crying, the five o’clock certainty that morning has already arrived. Ask a parent of a newborn what they would pay for one unbroken night and the answer comes fast — the two hundred thousand would start to look like a bargain. The sleep debt is eventually repaid, but slowly, in installments across years, and some of it simply becomes the new normal of a life lived slightly tired and entirely rearranged.

The second currency is freedom, and it goes quietly, so quietly that parents often cannot name the day it left. The spontaneous weekend trip. The late dinner that becomes a later night. The career gamble — the risky new job, the move across the country — that seemed exciting when the only mouth it fed was your own. All of it must now be weighed against school calendars, fevers, babysitters, and a small person whose claim on your hours is total and, somehow, mostly joyful to honor. Your time stops belonging to you in the way it once did. That is not a complaint. It is an accounting.

Then there is patience, which is tested not in dramatic moments but a thousand ordinary times a week: the milk poured deliberately onto the floor, the question asked for the fortieth time, the shoes that cannot be found by the only person who took them off. And there is worry, the currency with the longest term of all. It begins the day the child arrives — is he breathing, is she eating, is that fever the serious kind — and parents of grown children will tell you, with a rueful smile, that it never fully ends. It merely changes addresses: from the crib to the driver’s seat to the apartment in another state where the phone goes unanswered one beat too long.

The deepest currency is vulnerability, and there is no way to soften the description. To love a child is to hand the world a piece of your heart and watch it walk around outside your body — across streets, onto playing fields, into cars driven by other people’s teenagers, eventually out the front door for good. Every parent has made the same quiet bargain: a permanently enlarged capacity for joy, purchased with a permanently enlarged capacity for fear. No one told us the exchange rate at the hospital. We would not have believed it anyway.

I spent a career helping families count costs — estates settled, assets tallied, obligations itemized — and I learned that the most consequential entries are the ones that never appear on a statement. That is why I think the honest count matters. The couple who counts only the dollars will be blindsided by the real price, and an ante that surprises you breeds resentment; you start to feel the game cheated you, when in fact you simply never read the stakes. The couple who counts the sleep, the freedom, the worry, and the vulnerability — and pays with eyes open — has made a commitment instead of a miscalculation. The chips are the same. The spirit in which they are pushed forward is entirely different.

None of this is an argument against paying. It is an argument for paying honestly, the way a good player sizes a bet before he makes it: knowing the full amount, in every currency, and deciding the hand is worth it anyway. Parents have been making that decision for as long as there have been families.

Here is the takeaway. If you are weighing whether to have a child, or another child, do the full accounting together — not just the budget, but the sleep, the freedom, the patience, the worry, and the open heart. Say the real prices out loud to each other. Then decide, and if you decide to play, pay without keeping a resentful ledger. The two hundred thousand dollars is the line item everyone quotes. It is the rest of the price — and the willingness to pay it knowingly — that makes someone a parent.