Poker Articles

Do you remember the first time you ate ice cream?  If you’re anything like me, you probably squealed with delight. The fact is I still squeal with delight when I eat some good ice cream. Basically this is because I only eat ice cream once in a while.

But what if all you ate every meal every day was vanilla ice cream? No matter if it was my favorite Haagen  Dazs vanilla, I am sure that inside of a week I would be clamoring for an egg or a piece of toast or anything but ice cream.

Ever wonder why this is? I did also and unfortunately the answer lies buried within the one subject I failed in college – microeconomics. There is an economic principle called the law of diminishing marginal utility. Utility is the economic word for happiness and the law states that if you set out to eat five chocolate bars, the first one will give you the most happiness. Although your total happiness may go up if you eat the next one, it won’t go up by the same amount as it did the first time. By the time you eat the fifth bar you may hardly get any more happiness out of it at all.

In the real world we see applications of this all the time. Of course it’s most noticeable in things we use in small amounts. Whereas one aspirin may have gotten rid of my headache last month, this month I need two. When I was eighteen it only took two beers to get me blitzed and now it takes upwards of five. Even things people really like, sex for instance, loses a lot when it becomes routine and repetitive.

With the rash of recent posts like these:

http://www.pocketfives.com/03C66256-87AB-42A1-88BF-8A123BAC39D6.aspx

and

http://www.pocketfives.com/C2EA224A-955C-46DB-9B70-987B2265470D.aspx

I would just like to say one word – Moderation.

Poker is, after all, a game. The main reason we start to play games as children is because they are fun. With too much pressure and extreme levels of play, a game ceases to be fun and can even start to get on your nerves.

It’s only when something becomes a habit that it starts to go bad. There is a lot of wisdom in the old saying, “Everything in moderation.” At the least it will go a long way towards keeping happiness up and preventing burnout.

After almost thirty years of casino poker play I still think this game is fun. True there are times I want to take poker out behind the shed and strangle it. And I have taken a good, long break from the game at least once a year every year. But, through it all, I am still playing and enjoying myself.

Not for those who are pursuing the holy grail of professional pokerdom, and not for anyone who is willing to sacrifice happiness for their goal, but for the average person. And not just for poker, but for any activity that you enjoy. If you find yourself losing that passion you once had, try toning it down a bit. Maybe even take a break from it completely before you lose what once drew you to it. When you do come back to it you may find the love is still there. Now where did I put that quart of ice cream?