Closure is for Dummies

I just read an article on Medium about closure in relationships. No, I’m not breaking up with you, nor anyone else. It just that the title You Don’t Need Closure caught my attention.

Trust me, this is still a poker blog.

The aforementioned article begins thusly:

Sounds like the end of a lot of poker hands, doesn’t it?

Let me tell you how poker players seek closure: we call river bets when we know, deep down, we are beat. Hopeless hero calls.

Poker players want to know, we want to see the villains’ hole cards, we want to lock an image of those cards and the board in our brains to analyze when we went from ahead to behind to drawing dead. We want to figure out where we make a mistake. We want to make damn sure we didn’t get bluffed.

Like ex-girlfriends and boyfriends, ex-husbands and wives, we too want to make sense of what we don’t understand.

For that, we pay dearly.

Stop it, friends. Stop paying dearly on the river with losing hands.

Or think of it this way: Folding when beat beats lighting money on fire. Pretend you have a Men in Black memory eraser in your backpack that will wipe out the last hand, restoring calm, removing doubt, preserving chips.

In Texas Hold’em, the problem with closure is that closure is expensive.

The Medium article closes (see what I did there?) with:

So burn bridges, not bankrolls.

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