Complain about the cards for a living and you will go broke on schedule.
Every poker room has one. He gets his two cards, looks at them the way a man looks at a parking ticket, and begins the evening’s narration. Bad luck. Cold deck. The fellow across the table gets aces twice an hour and our friend can’t buy a pair. Some of it is even true, which is what makes it useless. Because here is the first hard fact of the game: nobody at the table picked his cards. Not the winner, not the loser, not you. The deal is the deal. It is not fair in the sense of being equal. It is simply what happened, and the only part of it that belongs to you is what you do next.
Watch the good players and you’ll notice they spend almost no energy on the injustice of a hand. The cards are information, not a verdict. A strong hand in early position is a different problem than the same hand on the button, and a weak hand is not automatically a worthless one — it’s a hand that asks a different question. Sometimes the right play is to push. Sometimes it’s to wait, to see a cheap flop, to let the table show you something. Sometimes the best play you’ll make all night is folding seven-deuce for the fortieth time without it costing you a dime of dignity. The hand doesn’t decide. The player does, inside limits the hand sets. That’s not a consolation prize. That’s the entire game.
Position teaches the same lesson from the other side. You don’t choose where you sit relative to the button, either — not hand by hand. Speak early and you play the whole street half blind, guessing at what six other men are holding. Speak last and the table has told you half its story before you commit a chip. Smart players don’t curse their seat. They adjust to it. Tighten up early, open up late, and understand that the same two cards are worth different money depending on nothing more than where you’re sitting when they arrive.
And then there’s the matter of the man across the table — the one who, in your running account of the evening, keeps getting the cards you were supposed to get. Every player has felt the heat of that. You can spend a whole night watching another man’s stack grow and mentally redealing his hands into your lap, and all it will buy you is a shorter night and an emptier pocket. His cards are not your business. They were never going to be your cards. The deck doesn’t owe you his run, and envy is the one bet at a poker table that has never once paid out.
The players who last understand this in their stomachs: you are not being graded against the best hand at the table. You’re being measured on what you did with yours.
It turns out a traveling master once made the same point with money instead of cards.
Before a long journey, he called three of his servants and handed over his capital — not equally, because he knew his men. To one he gave five talents, a fortune. To another, two. To the last, one — and even one talent was years of a working man’s wages, so nobody at that table was truly empty-handed. The distribution wasn’t equal. It was matched, the story says, to each man’s ability. Different stacks. Different hands. One instruction implied: play.
The five-talent man put his to work and doubled it. The two-talent man did the same — doubled his, too, which is to say he finished with less money than the first man and the same perfect record. The one-talent man dug a hole and buried his. Safe. Untouched. Exactly one talent, returned with the dirt still on it.
When the master settled accounts, the five-talent man heard the words every player wants to hear: “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.” And then the two-talent man stepped up with his smaller result — and heard the same words. Not similar words. The same. Word for word. He had less to work with and produced less, and the praise didn’t shrink by a single syllable, because he was never being compared to the man beside him. He was being asked one question: what did you do with what you were given?
The buried talent, meanwhile, got no praise at all — not because the hand was small, but because it was never played.
Somebody will always be dealt more than you: more money, more health, more chances, a better seat. That’s the deal, and it isn’t changing. The question that follows you home from every table is the only one that was ever really being asked. Not what were you holding compared to him. What did you do with the hand in front of you?
Play that one. It’s yours.
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