Some of my earliest memories are playing cards with my great uncle Ernie at my grandparents’ house.
The table was my grandma’s old glass-top wicker dining table. No chips. Just hand after hand and a mental ledger that I’ll never make black. We played five-card draw, seven-card stud, and sometimes a strange seven-card variation where your lowest card in the hole was wild.
I don’t remember specific hands. Honestly, I don’t even really remember Ernie clearly. I haven’t seen a picture of him in so long that if I did I might not recognize him. The memory is more like a still frame than a movie.
What I remember most is the feeling.
Ernie had that hustler energy. If he dealt and you picked up a good hand, there was always a small voice wondering if he might have given himself something better. I don’t think he ever cheated me. He never taught me how to stack a deck or deal off the bottom. But he didn’t have to. Just the possibility that he could was enough to get inside your head.
Looking back, that might have been the first lesson poker taught me: sometimes the most powerful move at the table is the one you never actually make.
I’ve almost never turned down a card game in my life. If someone wanted to play, I’d sit down.
The problem was getting a poker game going in the first place. Outside of Vegas, when the guy from Vegas suggests poker, people tend to get suspicious. Between that and some pretty isolated years in Colorado and Texas, the games rarely materialized.
On deployments the cards did come out regularly, but the game was usually spades. When we wanted to switch things up we’d play dominoes. Poker just wasn’t on anyone’s radar. In Afghanistan we didn’t exactly have much to wager anyway, and in Iraq I usually ended up in my one-man room watching movies or grinding deeper into a long PlayStation football career.
Poker never disappeared though. It just sat in the background.
After breaking my back and spending a lot of time alone, I finally dove into online play. Apparently I missed the early 2000s when the games were softer. Modern players study. They know the math.
I discovered pretty quickly that the skill gap I thought I had was actually the other way around.
For years I had mostly played on instinct. Gut feeling. Table sense. The kind of things you pick up playing cards around a kitchen table. Studying pot odds, ranges, and tournament strategy added a layer I had ignored for a long time.
The more I study the game, the more I realize poker is really just life condensed.
Not long ago I picked up pocket kings at a cash table. Second time I’d seen them that session. The first time had built my stack up to about a buy-in and a half.
A short stack shoved. I raised. Another player behind me jammed for the rest of my chips.
I called.
The short stack turned over pocket threes. The other player had queens.
From a decision standpoint it was the best situation my kings could realistically hope for.
The flop came Q-3-7.
Sometimes poker is like that.
You make the best decision you can with the information you have, everything lines up the way it should… and the flop has other plans.
That’s life too.
Everyone is doing the best they can with their hand and their stack. Everyone has their own goals, their own tolerance for risk, their own reasons for being at the table.
Poker is life condensed.
Once the cards are dealt you can’t change your stack. All you can do is decide how to play the hand in front of you.
Life gives you more time to build your stack.
But just like poker, you’re still making decisions without seeing everyone else’s cards.
Mic G
Life after door kicking. 
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