https://hotair.com/headlines/archives/2013/02/24/want-to-bring-americas-classes-together-make-poker-mandatory/feed/HotAir is the leading conservative blog for breaking news and commentary covering the Biden administration, politics, media, culture, and current elections.en-usTue, 09 Jun 2026 04:32:09 -0400<![CDATA[Poker tables are pure meritocracies. The pecking order of respect at Charles Town is determined by how good you are at the game. Other players may like you personally, but if you’re a bad player you’re a bad player, and nothing about your status in the outside world makes any difference. For readers with high-powered degrees and high-powered jobs, let me suggest that nothing will do more to keep your feet on the ground than to start playing poker in a public casino. Poker is a game of incomplete information involving complex intellectual tasks, self-discipline and the courage to take properly calculated risks. When you are outthought and outplayed not just once, but regularly, by a skinny 28-year-old wearing a football jersey and with his baseball cap on backward, it is hard to condescend to him because he doesn’t wear grown-up clothes and never went to college. It will also do you good to be in the deference-free zone that is a poker room — as in recently, when I was cashing out and the woman in the cashier’s cage, noting my stack of chips with the patterns on the edges carefully aligned, said confidentially, “Your O.C.D. is showing, baby doll.”]]>Sun, 24 Feb 2013 21:20:32 -0500<![CDATA[Allahpundit]]>https://hotair.com/headlines/2013/02/24/want-to-bring-americas-classes-together-make-poker-mandatory-n100414