Chained to Freedom

The best hours to play poker are when everyone else is having fun - nights and week-ends. You will look across the table and see someone laughing, drinking, winning and tossing random, large tips to the dealer. He will toss so many chips that invariably a few of them bounce off the table and everyone (except you) laughs while they hunt for the bits of clay that you have dedicated your life trying to accumulate. You will be pale, hunched over your cards, losing, trying to calculate odds and thinking, "There must be a better way to make a living." You will try to smile and remain clear-headed. Here you are working and everyone else is having fun. When you finally win a hand you will sheepishly slide one little dollar chip to the dealer, not knowing if you feel worse because are so cheap or because you can not really afford it.

The next morning when your friends are having a pool party you will be catching up on your sleep. When you wake up you will re-play in your mind all the mistakes you made last night. You will never stop thinking about poker hands. Really you are only away from poker when you are sleeping. Even then, if you play a lot, you will dream of hands being dealt. Sometimes it is random card dreams, but also you will be confronted with a common poker nightmare. In this dream you will be dealt a huge hand, maybe a Royal Flush. You will be raised. There will be a huge pile of chips on the table. Then reality begins to alter or maybe it is your perception getting sharper, but every time you look back at your cards your holding gets weaker and weaker. Your Royal Flush turns to a full house and you look again and now it is just a regular flush, 3 of a kind.... it goes on down to a pair of sixes or maybe just random cards. The huge pile of chips will elude you. This is as common as the being naked in school dream you had in the 7th grade.

You will need to play a lot to win, probably more hours than you ever spent working at any of your real jobs.

Your co-workers are trying to get you to quit working at your job. Of course, you don't have any co-workers really, just enemies at work. They will lie and try to deceive you constantly. They will resent or disbelieve that you play poker for a living. If you admit you do they will say, "Must be nice."

Strangers sometimes needle you for no apparent reason with the Slow Roll. The Slow Roll is when, after a hand is over, a player intentionally feigns that he is beat by shaking his head, sighing and other such theatrics as he slowly turns over his cards before suddenly, triumphantly exposing a Monster Hand, an obvious winner. You won't need to provoke a person to get the Slow Roll.

You will have to pay for your own health insurance. If you neglect to do this you will explore previously unexplored home remedies to avoid going to a doctor. The time, energy and pain spent during these ridiculous adventures will never turn out to be worth it.

You will have to go through some unusual hoops or pay outrageously large sums of cash when renting an apartment or house or buying a car.

You will go through losing streaks so outrageously unlucky you will draw only one conclusion: God does not want you to play poker for a living.

Lastly, you will have no record of having a job for years and when your next employer inquires about this troubling gap in your history you will only be able reassure him with this sentence: "I played poker during that time."