Until I can get my highest interest credit card paid off the opportunities to sit at a live poker table will be few and far between. And it will mean starting with a short stack even if I do get the chance. But unless I bust out in one game to build up a chunk of seed money that is how it will have to be.
But there is another gamble that I have chosen to put some money towards before taking care of the immediate demands of the monthly bills. That would be investing in the stock market. Yes, with a bit of extra cash coming in I put $300 into my near extinct investment account. Without a stock transaction soon a built in fee would have nearly liquidated the account as it was.
Misfortune hardly describes my past experience in the stock market, thank you Y2K. Having lost thousands and having to extract thousands for other needs at inopportune times my investments have sat in tatters for many a year now. Recently one of two companies I had a stake in went under leaving me with nothing but ten shares in a small electronics company that paid a dividend.
Yes the stock market is a gamble. I read a small Internet article where the author described the poker betting process in the same manner as investment strategy. In terms of risk and reward. What is the factor on your potential return versus the risk. So I put more money into this dividend paying stock buying 50 shares at $4. A stock that before this economic downturn almost never went under $7 and was known to go up over twice that at times. It had been lower than $3 at its lowest and I felt a hunch to buy more when it was more than a dime lower than $4. As it was, it was sitting above $4 and came down the day after I put my bid in. Since then it has gone up over $1. But it will be the following investments, after I decide to sell this bit of fortune, that will decide how good of a decision to divert these funds was.
The reality is that life is full of risk taking on one level or the other. Life requires the ability to make decisions. Decisions that require an investment and contain no guarantee that the desired result will occur or that some unknown factor will not frustrate the expected outcome. It requires knowledge and the ability to read people and environments. All realities that can be introduced in game play.
Some may think that poker, gambling with money, would be an inappropriate way of learning these skills. I often think fondly of playing sheep's head with my family. A game where the card play determines the outcome as well as the ability to determine who your unknown partner is. The nickle and dime stakes, now supposedly illegal in Wisconsin as a favor to certain campaign contributors, were hardly life changing gains or losses but plenty to heighten the senses and hone ones skills; ones abilities to read a situation and make informed decisions.
An argument in the online poker debate is that the micro stakes that the Internet can provide actually keep people with gambling problems from going bust in other aspects of their lives. And when more and more casinos are opening up, accessible to a larger and larger portion of the population, it would seem people with a problem have greater opportunity to get into games of much greater stakes 24 hours a day. As far as the Internet I know that in Korea, where Internet use and role play gaming has been recognized as a serious problem especially for the young, they have systems that cut users off after five hours a day. And also in my previously mentioned discussion with a gentleman at the gym, he brought up the fact that at a casino, in the gambling scene, you come across a lot of seedy people you have to be careful of.
People whose lives are destroyed by gambling have been found to have other problems that contributed to their failings. I heard a report by the BBC on the radio of someone who has done a study showing that gambling actually has a positive effect for many people. Why? Because it is incredibly fun, taking the risk and dreaming of potential unimaginable success, but at the same time not depending on, or expecting, to win. People with sound decision making processes interacting in a responsible fashion. Playing games is fun and they reflect the challenges and dreams we all have in life. A release everyone can enjoy from time to time whether at the poker table or... on the monopoly board if poker isn't your kind of game.
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