Delivering Happiness

Part of the reason was that I started noticing it was the same players who
were showing up all the time, and many of them seemed to be playing full-
time either because they didn’t have anything else to do or were trying to
win their rent money for the month. After I’d spent several months learning
and practicing the mathematics of the game, playing limit hold ’em started
to feel more and more mechanical, and less and less challenging.
So I started making weekend trips to Las Vegas, and found the game
much more interesting there. I got to meet a lot of interesting people from
all different backgrounds. Most of them didn’t even live in Vegas, and many
of them were running their own successful businesses as their full-time
occupation. Poker was just a fun hobby that they occasionally did on the
side.
I stopped playing in the California card rooms altogether. While I would
continue to play poker throughout my life, poker stopped being a focus for
me. I was far from a world-class player, but I had learned enough about the
game that I was ready for something different. For me, the goal of all future
poker games would no longer be trying to make money or improving my
poker skills and experience. Moving forward, the goal and purpose of
playing poker would be more about hanging out with friends, meeting
interesting people, and building relationships.
I’d realized that whether in poker, in business, or in life, it was easy to
get caught up and engrossed in what I was currently doing, and that made it
easy to forget that I always had the option to change tables. Psychologically,
it’s hard because of all the inertia to overcome. Without conscious and
deliberate effort, inertia always wins.
I’d started to force myself to think again about what I was trying to get
out of life. I asked myself what I was trying to accomplish, what I wanted to
do, and whether I should be sitting at a different table. From my poker
experience, I knew it was never too late to change tables.
I realized that once I had learned the basics of poker, I wasn’t really
building anything by spending endless hours in casinos playing the game. I
realized that I needed to be doing something more fulfilling, and that maybe
I was no longer playing the right game. After what felt like an intensive

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summer fling with the game of poker, I decided it was time for me to move
on to something new.
It was time for me to change tables.