Kipling Said It Best

In the middle of his famous poem “If,” Rudyard Kipling poses the condition, “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same.” At the end of the poem filled with twenty or so other conditions, comes the conclusion, “you’ll be a Man, my son.” 

Although addressed to his son, this applies equally to daughters. The phrase is etched over the players’ entrance at Wimbledon’s Centre Court. I read it recently in a book by Maria Konnikova which I will review next week. This phrase was a very small part of the book, but it speaks to me as a video poker player as surely as it does to tennis players. 

Even the best tennis players lose some of the time. This poem says that one additional victory does mean that they’re all that great. One more loss doesn’t mean they’re all that bad.

Video poker likewise is full of variance. You don’t know whether royal flushes (called “triumph” in the poem) or an extended losing streak (called “disaster”) will be next in line to visit you. Play long enough and you’ll see a whole lot of both.

How many of you have pictures of your royal flushes on your cell phone waiting to show anyone polite enough to look? All they show are momentary good fortune. Positive variance. A participation award, so to speak. Play enough and you’ll get plenty of them. But to many gamblers, a success such as a royal flush means something special. Never mind that it might be on a game that nobody with a clue about winning would dream of playing.

How many of you have tried to impress people with the length and breadth of your misfortune? “I’ve had 149 scares since my last royal flush!” or perhaps, “I’m here every week trying and I never get called in these drawings!” Many gamblers are complainers. It isn’t just that it makes them annoying to be around.  If they really believe they are unlucky, it affects the decisions they make in all sorts of circumstances.

Kipling’s poem instructs that maturity comes when we can handle our successes and handle our misfortunes with a certain degree of equanimity. Although he said it far more elegantly than I did decades later, his words are sort of like the phrase I use, “Today’s Score Doesn’t Matter.” 

You’re going to have your ups and downs in video poker, as well as in tennis, and in all other parts of life. Overall, success (what Kipling calls becoming a Man, which he curiously capitalizes) comes from doing things correctly and shrugging off the speed bumps along the way.

Although I read Kipling’s poem for the first time decades ago, it never really stuck with me until I recently saw it in Konnikova’s book. It does today.