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On Saturday night Matt turned 35 and hosted the first poker night. Normally poker night would be filled with zealous poker folks hoping to hone their skills in preparation for a big trip to the high rollers room at Bellagio. The crowd including myself were complete poker nincompoops. We needed Matt to draw on a piece of paper the order of the hands so that we knew whether three of a kind beats a flush or if a straight beats a flush. Now a few days later I still would need the paper to remember which hand would win.

Poker night actually fell on the Venn diagram overlapping with NFL Wildcard playoffs. So Sarah and I had worked out at the gym while watching the first half of the NFC game. We went to the BSC at the Landmark center so that Sarah could go to Bed Bath and Beyond to return a gold drapery that she had bought with Kim as a test for the living room. She had created a model of one of the windows and it looked positively too regal for the living room. Plus the curtain wrapping was over $80 so it better look great if we are going to get three of them. At Bed, Bath, and Beyond she then proceeded to purchase matching white curtains to match what was left of the model window after removing the gold drapery to just get the basics covering the windows and avoid neighbors peeking into our exciting lives where they might see things like us watching movies in the living room. Sarah put those new curtains up on Sunday afternoon. Later in the day she realized that we had two sets of off-white curtains and one set of white curtains that was a great disappointment to her given that she needs to make another trip to the great beyond.

The AFC playoff game was a great distraction because it provided much entertainment whenever I needed to fold my cards. I don't think it is proper poker etiquette to fold as soon as you see your cards and then go to watch the Jets vs. Chargers game. The poker game itself showed some competitive spirit and strangely at first the guys playing were winning while the women were losing. I am not sure why this was but it may be some basic social capacity for men to be deceitful and successful at it. It also might have had something to do with the cards that we were dealt. Sarah did get a straight flush, which is almost impossible to beat, and she didn’t raise her bet with it against me so being poker nincompoops could also have contributed to some of the women’s results.

One thing about poker that is dangerous is that it encourages people to bluff each other outside of the poker table. Once you learn that you can get someone to concede by concealing that you don’t have a great hand that behavior carries over into other pursuits. For example, good sales people are normally good poker players.

This would be good if it doesn’t potentially have disastrous consequences when someone overplays their cards in real life. Suppose during a sales process the sales representative decides that they have the client convinced that they can only do business with their company. They then press the client to pay high rates beyond what they should be able to afford or would normally agree to because they have bluffed the client into resigning that they only have one solution. Siebel, SAP, and Oracle used to be great at doing this. The client is backed into a corner and the sales rep is basically gambling that they can still get what they want once they know that the client’s negotiating position is weak.

The rep is encouraged to bluff as much as possible and push for the highest possible price but at some critical breaking point they can overplay their hand and the client can be forced to go to a competitor causing the deal fall apart completely and screw-up the work that the engineering department, customer service teams, marketing and management team have put into making it possible for them to have a good hand in the first place. But you need to have sales people able to gamble and when they win it can be very rewarding but when they lose… everyone around them loses with them. That’s why a lot of people get annoyed with sales people.