connecting*the*dots

I can’t tell you how much I love playing Spades.

52 cards, split up between four players in teams of two. Your partner is your pahtnah; you know his tendencies, he knows yours. If you’re really tuned in during the bidding process and through the first two books, counting count cards and deductive reasoning takes over without much effort. After some practice, especially with the same partner, you can look forward to setting your opponents with amazing regularity.

Spades is about sharing that moment of victory with your pahtnah; it’s a game for bravado and talking smack. It’s Love & Hate on Radio Rahim’s knuckles. It has a pulse of its own.

Poker is so different.

1. No matter what game of poker you’re playing, you’re on your own.
2. Only cards dealt face up and player movement will give you a hint in counting cards.
3. You have to play your hand, the cards on the table, more than one deck at a time and the tendencies of your opponents. Patterns have to be established from the way your opposition reacts to various situations, but unless you play with the same people for an extended period of time even that strategy doesn’t help too much, as tendencies based on a stereotype aren’t too reliable.

Poker forces you to execute at a precise moment in time based on a plethora of variables; a majority of which are unknown.

A player folding twice in a row, with face cards in the second hand just to throw the table is a perfectly, rational strategy. Being conservative with three aces to raise the stakes, after raising on a bluff to gain a stake of the pot is SOP. Playing a straight game 85% of the time–in the midst of the madness — creates even more of a competitive advantage.

Poker is cold and calculating; poker is schizophrenic.

A poker player doesn’t strive for that moment of Quan; he plays to take all the chips for himself.

So which of these two games would you guess to be more popular in institutionalized environments, such as a federal prison? Which would you guess is more popular with Wall Street types on a Wednesday night after raking in $10k of commisions on speculative stock trades?

Let the gamble of our non-sustainable future continue.