In which Our Hero recalls, yet again, that feelings are weather, not climate.
Poker.
I don’t like poker.
It fucking sucks.
The intensity, the swings, the way it presses you between two stones: your own decisions and the randomness of the universe. As one poker TV show once put it, “It’s a hard way to make an easy living.”
There was a time I stopped playing altogether because I believed poker was net-negative for the world. You take money from people who can’t afford it. Addicts. The lonely. The poor.
And what do you give in return?
Entertainment?
A distraction?
A slow-motion morality play about risk and consequence?
These were my thoughts after losing two big pots tonight.
One I played fine. Just ran into the top of someone’s range.
The other I played poorly preflop in a $50 splash pot and donated my stack like a confused philanthropist. (“Splash pot” = the casino added $50 to it for free.)
Woof.
So I asked myself, as one does after being spiritually hit by a train:
Why do I do this?
Why are we attracted to what we’re attracted to?
Is it genetics? Happenstance? Praise when we were eight and wanted to feel special?
Clown school has taught me one brutal, luminous thing:
You will be pummeled on your chosen path.
Mocked, rejected, flattened, ignored.
And that’s just by the teachers!
Your path should therefore be the thing you continue doing despite the punishment.
What’s the thing you’ll walk through hell for?
I’m deeply dissatisfied with poker tonight. But here’s the truth:
Poker is a game of millions of hands.
Variance is a dragon that only bows after thousands upon thousands of repetitions.
This hand doesn’t matter.
This session doesn’t matter.
Clowning, on the other hand, is both slower and faster.
Yes, the craft takes years, maybe a lifetime – but the feedback is instantaneous.
You step out, you try something, and either the audience lights up now, or it doesn’t.
Steve Martin once asked himself:
“What happens if I never release the tension?”
Instead of setup → punchline → laugh from tension relief, he just stacked more and more absurdity.
If someone left the show emotionless and burst out laughing in the car ride home, he considered that a victory.
(His memoir is worth a read.)
Here’s the thing about Cards.
And the thing about Clowning.
The C’s don’t care about your feelings.
The dealer doesn’t pause because you’re tilted.
The audience doesn’t laugh because you’re sad.
The next hand came.
My body was buzzing with frustration.
But I played fine.
And that was what mattered.
Ugh.
—
It’s now an hour later.
The frustration is gone.
How astonishing, how liberating, how funny it is to remember how fleeting feelings are.
And how little they matter to the game.
Any game.
When the next hand is already being dealt.
Unless you let them play instead of you.
And they are both bad cardplayers and bad clowns.
—
We’re now an hour after that.
I quit the live game because it wasn’t profitable enough.
I wasn’t having fun.
I asked myself the question “If I lost my stack in the next hand, would I rebuy and keep plying?”
The answer was no.
So now I’m at the deli, eating dinner with my father…
While we play online poker with a different group.
🤡
Julian Wise 