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How Poker strategy helped me think about these surreal Covid times.
We have all been dealt a bunch of lousy cards
It’s a tough time for everyone. No matter who you are or where you live, the landscape has shifted. No one escapes this virus. In many ways it is an equalizer. Just like poker.
Whether you’re waiting it out in a bigger house, in a smaller town, with not enough or too many people in your household, with or without a job….everybody is, at some level, experiencing a bad hand. Yes, it is worse for some than others, but that’s how it is, in both life and poker, during non-pandemic times as well.
My company, PokerDivas, provides interactive, educational leadership and diversity programs built on getting people together live. Unfortunately, that isn’t possible now. So, we’re taken this time to develop and offer virtual PokerDivas options which ideally will help the brand scale up. Short-term, it’s a very big challenge. But in the long-term, this could be a big win.
Everybody goes on tilt
When you play a hand of poker where you’re a big favorite to win and someone gets lucky on the final river card, that’s known as a bad beat. A bad beat messes with your head. When it affects your performance going forward it’s called “going on tilt.” A distinguishing trait of a great player is how quickly they recover from their bad beats and overcome the tilt mindset.
Right now it’s easy to have a really bad day. Or, for some, including myself, a bad week. But know that some good will come out of this. You may become clearer on your career goals, pivot your business, pick up a new language, connect with family or friends in a more intense way, write a book , relax for the first time in a decade, or improve your poker skills.
That’s the way we’ll win during this crisis.
This is a game of endurance
A poker tournament is a marathon. In a big event like the World Series of Poker Main Event (postponed this year, unfortunately) you may be playing with 7,000 other people.
You don’t make your initial $10,000 buy-in money back until you’ve outlasted 90% of those people. Then, to make it into the big money, you need to beat most of the rest.
When it comes down to the “final nine“ players, the prize for each spot can go up by seven figures. When the end is finally in sight, you have to have the same persistence and diligence you had on the very first hand. If you let your guard down now and get sloppy, you will ruin everything you worked so hard to achieve. It is physically and mentally exhausting.
Sound familiar? Lockdowns, closures, quarantines, masks, and suffering businesses are all tough to handle for almost everyone. But if we get sloppy now by not following the rules, then we will wind up back where we started and this period of sacrifice will have been for naught.
Stay the course. That’s how we’ll win.
And if while staying the course, you would like to have some fun with your team or clients and a few hours of respite from worldly cares, I invite you to check out our PokerDivas interactive Virtual Program. We would love to see you at the table. /virtual-poker/
Stay safe, healthy, sane, and hopeful. We will win this together!
