The Good Fold...

For most of you out there poker is just a fun game that you watch on t.v. or played with your family when you were little. Maybe you and a few friends get together and play once in a while or maybe you play it at a party and end the game a bit more scantily clad than you started. When you begin to take the game more seriously, learn more about the proper strategy to apply to the game when playing, the lessons learned can be applied to other things in life as well.

I'm not gonna bore you with poker game theory or statistical hand match up advantages. Yet, there is one rule that I find particularly interesting, as it applies to life just as much as it applies to poker. That rule is, "Don't get married to your hand."

The rule is simple. When getting dealt your first cards in a particular round...no matter how good they seem to be at the start....it's always proper to take the strength of your hand with a grain of salt. The reason for this is because a certain percentage of the time your hand will still become the second or third best. The reason why this "RULE" is so important is just as simple. If you have a bad hand....you don't want to put any money in the pot. But if you start with good cards...you have a tendency to want to invest everything you got even though it becomes more evident that you are holding a loser.

Life is crazy. It's amazing that no matter how smart we become as we get older...it's seems impossible to figure anything out. I still have no clue what I'm doing. Conversely, I've never met anyone who walks around confidently saying, "Yah, I got this life thing figured out....what's next on the agenda?"

One thing I do know is through life we get dealt some amazing looking stuff sometimes. Situations or people that, at first look, seem to have great potential and could provide maximum gain. So we invest ourselves into these affairs hoping to get what we thought we may get in the beginning. Yet sometimes, in life, as the same as in poker....things don't go as we planned. Our once exciting world of possibilities turns out to have one single, mundane road leading to disaster. But just like when we are holding two black aces and staring at an obvious made flush...we continue to go down that road because of the promise that was so inviting. So lucrative.

It's at that moment, as a serious poker player, that you learn to make the good fold. You don't get married to your hand. You let it go because you know that later on, in the future another opportunity will arise and it may be even more profitable than the last. You know in your gut that continuing down that road will just cause you to lose more of what you invest. It's hard. It's really hard letting go of those two aces. Seeing them and every potential benefit you may have obtained when you first picked them up go fluttering away as your cards slide into the graveyard of the muck.

When you're beat, you're beat.

Same with life. I'm not advocating just quiting anything you start with the fear that you might not be successful. Everyone out here has that one thing in their life that they know they should have ended a long time ago. It may have seemed really great at first but the sum of mean has shown less than optimal results. It's time to make the good fold and move on so you can be prepared for the better things that are to come. There will always be better spots. Always.