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Maryann Guberman has been a writer and editor with many gaming publications, including Sports Form, Card Player, Poker World, Player's Panorama and Systems and Methods. She also has written and edited numerous books on gambling.

Oct 21, 2006

It's a Wonderful (Poker) Life

Be more splendid, more extraordinary. Use every moment to fill yourself up. -- Oprah Winfrey

Imagine you had to sit in a stuffy office all day long crunching numbers or correcting typos. Worse yet, what if you had to be a cashier in a casino where the electricity of gambling action crackles with the clacking of chips and the swishing of shuffled cards. Think about how awful it would be if you had to stand in front of 35 runny-nosed first graders teaching them to print their names. What if you had to count beans all day?

Okay these jobs aren't the end of the world. Some people are perfectly suited to them and they reap personal rewards from performing them. And in all honesty, without people taking care of the mundane tasks the rest of the folks who absolutely abhor those kinds of jobs couldn't really enjoy their own version of the good life.

Poker players are truly an exceptionally lucky group of people, especially the ones who play frequently and chiefly for professionals.

Even the losing poker players fall into that large vat of luck!

After all, what other job allows you to show up in whatever garb you want, be it jeans, shorts, muscle shirts, or low-cut tops? (Clothing is required unless of course you're playing online.) How many places let you slog around in flip-flops and slightly off-color T-shirts while those around you might be decked to the nines?

Where else can you insert ear buds and listen to a playlist of 1,000 personally selected songs (or subliminal messages about winning) on an IPod while plying your trade?

What other job lets someone like Tony Guoga bait and berate fellow players to put them off their game (http://www.tonygpoker.com/)? And, at the same time, where else you can do that next to someone as genteel in manner as Mimi Rogers who would never consider trash talking?

How many employers let you leave the job site to chatter with friends outside or at another job site?

What other form of employment lets you take full credit for success when you had nothing to do with the outcome - and then proclaims you a genius?

It's no wonder every jock and his brother are flocking to the poker arena. It's not the money. Well, silly, of course it's the money. But it's mostly that fantastic ego inflating experience of doing something to dominate someone else. It's that electric zap of pleasure that comes with winning, of being top dog at least for a moment.

What's pleasing about poker is that rivalry at the table doesn't have to spill into life away from the table (though sometimes it does). Best friends, married couples, siblings, fathers and children can compete against each other with an absolute drive to win at all costs, knock their significant others, buddies and relatives out of a competition, and there's no harm done (at least in most cases).

As with any game and any job, poker has its unfortunates who have no life beyond it; the game has its predators who regale in punishment; it even has its savants who cannot function in life with a bet on something. But they are in the minority, and many of them burn out quickly.

Poker isn't everything and it's not for everybody but it is, in its own fashion, a wonderful life.