In the middle of his famous poem \u201cIf,\u201d Rudyard Kipling poses the condition, \u201cIf you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same.\u201d At the end of the poem filled with twenty or so other conditions, comes the conclusion, \u201cyou\u2019ll be a Man, my son.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Although addressed to his son, this applies equally to daughters. The phrase is etched over the players\u2019 entrance at Wimbledon\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Even the best tennis players lose some of the time. This poem says that one additional victory does mean that they\u2019re all that great. One more loss doesn\u2019t mean they\u2019re all that bad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Video poker likewise is full of variance. You don\u2019t know whether royal flushes (called \u201ctriumph\u201d in the poem) or an extended losing streak (called \u201cdisaster\u201d) will be next in line to visit you. Play long enough and you\u2019ll see a whole lot of both.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
How many of you have tried to impress people with the length and breadth of your misfortune? \u201cI\u2019ve had 149 scares since my last royal flush!\u201d or perhaps, \u201cI\u2019m here every week trying and I never get called in these drawings!\u201d Many gamblers are complainers. It isn\u2019t just that it makes them annoying to be around.\u00a0 If they really believe they are unlucky, it affects the decisions they make in all sorts of circumstances.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Kipling\u2019s 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, \u201cToday\u2019s Score Doesn\u2019t Matter.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Although I read Kipling\u2019s poem for the first time decades ago, it never really stuck with me until I recently saw it in Konnikova\u2019s book. It does today. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the middle of his famous poem \u201cIf,\u201d Rudyard Kipling poses the condition, \u201cIf you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same.\u201d At the end of the poem filled with twenty or so other conditions, comes the conclusion, \u201cyou\u2019ll be a Man, my son.\u201d\u00a0 Although addressed to his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15763,"featured_media":6498,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Kipling Said It Best by Bob Dancer","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[558,643,557],"tags":[561,585],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120979"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15763"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=120979"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120979\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=120979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=120979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=120979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}