The Games We Play Tell Us a Lot about Life

People love to play games. What many people don’t realize is that games resemble life as much as life resembles games. Even the free casino games you think you’re playing “just to pass the time” are more significant than we think. After all, do any other creatures have the concept of time?

Here we will look at four favorite games and see in what ways they teach us about life. In order to set the stage for the game of preference of readers of this blog, we’ll save poker for last.

Monopoly

This game values incremental gains. We collect money, get lucky, go to jail for a while, build up our holdings, and try not to throw it all away on a premature move.

Set

This game rewards quick observation and a sort of adult version of connect the dots. We need to see connections that are in front of us but still inaccessible unless we look very closely. Thinking out of the box is helpful and determinedly not repeating failed analyses is also valuable.

Risk

In this game, you accumulate holdings and try to parley them into even more holdings. Overwhelming force often wins the day, but not always, as your opponents have power, too, and can thwart your plans in surprising ways.

Poker

This game embodies all of the elements of the above games. Like Monopoly, we make incremental gains. This is exactly the type of approach investment counselors make; invest for the long term. Take profits when you can and feel like you should and use the profits to try to achieve small gains on more fronts.

In poker, the incremental gains we make are not only the money we win; it is also the doubt we seed, the small bluffs we succeed in making, and the sense in our opponents that we know more than we actually know.

We get lucky in poker when the cards fall exactly as we want them to fall and we go to jail when we lose a bad beat. When we’re in jail in poker, we can mope around, whine about our bad luck, call our successful opponent stupid for making such a ridiculous bet that won in the end, or we can shrug it off and get back to the challenge at hand which is to evaluate our own cards in light of what our opponents do.

In business, if we lose a contract or discover that our business model was not as good as we thought, we can fold our tent or we can reorganize our efforts. Sam Walton lost his lease on a building where he had a small store. Then he started Walmart in a small corner of a small state.

The Mars family went bankrupt twice while trying to find a winning recipe for a chocolate bar in their home kitchen. Then they discovered the recipe and began producing one of the most popular lines of chocolate bars in the world.

In poker, we also need to start again and learn from the past rather than stewing in it.

Poker is Like Set

In Set, there are no incremental gains. There is no bluffing. You can’t fast play or slow play. You don’t have hidden assets. Set is basically a game where you see the connection or you don’t. Thus, the primary skill in Set is observation.

There are several secondary skills you need to excel at Set. You need to concentrate fully on your mission knowing full well that your opponents are doing the same and are about to call out “set”. In a famous hockey game in North America, a team was losing by one goal in the last seconds of the game. They were playing without their goalie in order to have more offensive players on the ice. The puck came to an opponent who skated toward the empty net. The puck bounced, he lost control of it, and the team that was losing skated down the ice and scored the tying goal with seconds remaining.

If the team had simply given up with seconds to play, the mishap in front of the empty net would have meant little but some embarrassment for the player. But they didn’t give up and tied the game.

Perseverance is such an important element of life in general that we often lose sight of it when we are playing games. It is the ability to stay in the game mentally and emotionally even if it looks like the cards will never go our way that often separates the poker winners and life winners from the losers.

Risk

This game involves incremental gain. It rewards perseverance. It values looking for ways to get back into the fray after a battle went against the odds. The one thing Risk punishes is trying to win big too quickly. In poker, you’ll have some big pots but you can also have a run of pots where you bet wisely but lose anyway.

Life is as much about luck as it is about skill. Every poker player named Phil knows how fleeting good luck can be and how unrelenting bad luck can be. Luck has no heart. Bad luck shows no remorse. In Risk, there is also no bluffing. There is only strategy coupled with strength and luck.

Life often embodies the same elements. We set out our goals. We work hard to achieve them. We do everything right. Then if we’re also lucky, everything comes together and we “win”. But life doesn’t stop and we can’t rest on our laurels. We have to do it again. In short, life and poker alike are full of risks and we succeed when we both take some risks and get lucky.