Life the Poker Game

Life is in a lot of ways just like a poker game. You may be sitting there thinking Bro. Cole what in the world are you talking about? In life we make calculated risks. Everything we do, every decision we make is calculated. We calculate the win/lose possibilities in every decision we make. One decision after another one hand after another and hope they pay out. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t. Some of the hands that could have won for us we lay down before we ever start. Looking back they were the best hand but for whatever reason we choose not to play them. Maybe the calculations we made said there was to great of a chance for failure. Life just like a poker game is a gamble. We are dealt a hand and we try and try to make the best out of it. When sometimes we know that we are bluffing (lying) to make people think that our lives are so much better than they truly are.
In life the decisions we make as a child for the most part have no big consequences but as we grow older the decisions we make have greater and greater consequences to them. The same is true in poker at the beginning of the game the blinds are low and the risk is small. The consequences for losing are not that big. But as we get farther and farther into the game the blinds go up, the stakes are raised, and the consequences, the risks, are so much greater.
In poker there is a thing called the all-in moment. We hedge everything we have, we put everything on the line for some huge payout. We do the same thing in life if you stop and think about it. Think about marriage for some you bet everything you have on your marriage and you hope and pray that you win. But for others, for over 50% of American marriages people lose. It is nothing more than a coin flip in the world around us. But nevertheless we put everything we have on the line hoping to win.
In poker many times players put up a poker face and say that we have everything together, we bluff. Sometimes we are caught with cards that do not hold up. But other times we bluff our way thru the hand and make ourselves appear stronger knowing that truly we are weak. That is not that much different than the lives we live. We put on a face when we go out in public, we act as if we have everything together even tho we are dying on the inside. Sometimes we get caught and people call us on our bluff but sometimes they don’t.
We play hand to hand. Decision to decision. They pay out they don’t. Many times we go thru life with no plan, with no strategy. We are short sighted and focus in on a singular decision a singular hand. We don’t think about the long game we have before us. We don’t think about the life we have left. We for the most part never think about the consequences of our decisions until they are made.