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:
What did I do? What did I say? What could I have done differently? Is there someone else? Can we still be friends? Can we fix this?
We torture ourselves with questions when a relationship ends. We want to know the answers. We want to know why. We want to make sense of what we don’t understand.
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:
You don’t need closure, my love.
It’s time to move on.Burn that bridge and never look back.
So burn bridges, not bankrolls.
