Unexpected Poker Truths

I will be honest, I am not much of a poke player. Even with the craze in the last couple years, I've only played a hand full of times.

Last night I was invited by my 2nd cousin Russ Hopwood, a futures day trader here in downtown Lincoln to a weekly poker game at his hometown of Shelby, Nebraska, population 700. It was pretty neat. They have a private room set up with a $20 by-in and cheap $1 beers that come out of a soda machine with only the classics; Busch Lite, Bud Light, Miller Lite, and Coors Light!

Now this is where I found my new respect for poker, that I had not understood before. Sitting around the table of blue collar working types and farmers, I couldn't help feeling a little guilty, like perhaps my cousin and I were the smartest people there. All the talk of cattle and corn sure didn't make my first impression seem any less accurate. Now, smarter in the sense I was thinking was because both my cousin and I had professional office jobs and formal educations with a four-year degree. I soon realized that the "smarts" or skills learned in poker aren't learned in schools and that I definitely didn't have the them either.

As we started playing I thought my first impression had been right, when I started winning some bigger hands and amassing a large little fortune of my own. After about an hour in and 5 wins to my name the tide shifted and I started to loose and didn't win again until I had lost all my chips. It turns out that these small town boys had read me and let me win, to learn my "tells," then proceeded to out smart and out bluff me the rest of the night!

I learned, the hard way, life lessons that I already knew but often forget and some I didn't know:

1. Never rely on first impressions, no matter what you assume.
2. Don't assume.
3. Small town farmers are some smart and tactical poker players.
4. Reading people's emotions or "tells" is a valuable skill in any deal or negotiation.

With this said, for this year I plan to play more poker by setting up a weekly or monthly game of friends to hone my skills. Not that I like gambling or loosing money, but I feel valuable skills can be gained from learning to read people and as the song goes..."know when to hold em or know when to fold em."

It's about time

I finally have a blog. A place to put down my thoughts, my goals and my daily mishaps. A year has passed since I moved to Nebraska and started a new direction in my life. I regret not having a blog then, because with every big choice we make in life we are changed and I want to have an account of those changes. However I have noticed a few:

I have noticeably changed in many ways I never expected. I learned about myself being alone...really alone and that I can get motivated to work even when it's for myself. I realized I wasn't as outgoing as I once thought, when put in a place I'm not accustomed to and when I don't know anyone else around within a couple thousand miles, I actually had trouble branching out.

I hope to move every couple years, not because moving itself is great...it's hard to pick up go somewhere new, but because of the ways I am able to reinvent myself and gain new prospectives about life and people. People in Nebraska are different, well different from where I grew up, but in great ways. There is a real feeling of family and a "good neighbor" quality that I wish would rub off on other parts of the country. Life seems to move a little slower, at a pace where it can be enjoyed.

To give an example of the kind of people I have met in the last year and the friends I have made I can recall the time I got stuck in the mud on the side of the road. It was a rainy day, and I had tried to haul some rocks behind a trailer over to my project site. I didn't get very far onto the property before spinning and sinking down in the grease-like mud that is native here. Within 20 minutes, literally every truck that came by asked if I needed help and was will to get out in the rain and mud on a Friday evening to help a stranger out of the mud. Kindness spreads, and you can imagine my anticipation for the opportunity to be able to help someone else when the time comes.

A second example is that when ever it came around a holiday, whether it was Easter, Thanksgiving, or Christmas, I would always get invited to dinner by at least three or four families. They of course knew that I didn't really know too many people, but these were people I didn't know all that well and they still were kind enough to invite me over. I challenge myself this year to find an opportunity to do the same. I can't think how many times I must have missed out on the opportunity to make someone's day by inviting them over when they have nowhere to go, when I was so caught up in my own family dinners. I know what it's like now and I know how good it fealt to have somewhere to go.

This was a long one. I hope the next ones will be shorter and more to a point, but I am an engineer and get very few chances to write....so look out!