LIFE LESSONS FROM GIN (RUMMY, THAT IS)
I have to rest frequently during the day since my bout with bone marrow cancer in 2018. I often lay on the couch with my feet up and play online Gin Rummy, so I’ve racked up a few games, and I keep thinking there are a lot of really good life lessons in this game. I think that’s why card games are so popular—because they reflect our lives in some way. From experiential learning to going all-in every once in a while, I’ve ruminated on at least eight different paradigms for living that also work well in playing rummy.
Learn by doing
It’s one thing to read the rules and think about playing the game, but the real key is to dive in and learn from experience, both good and bad, so don’t be afraid to make mistakes. We always learn just as much–if not more–from our fumbles and losses than we do from success. Kids learn to walk and to eat with a spoon by trying and failing, over and over. The good news is that for most of us, failure is not fatal.
Luck evens out over time.
My skill level is average because I don’t actually care that much, and I’m just seven games shy of exactly 50/50 wins to losses; 767 wins and 774 losses. Katie and I played to 10,000 a couple of times instead of just 500, carrying over the score from week to week, and we always ended up within a hundred points of each other. Luck is exactly random, and so in the long run, flipping a coin a thousand times for instance, results in something surprisingly close to 500 heads and 500 tails. That means if you feel you’re suffering from a string of bad luck in your life and you just approach it with an observant attitude, it should turn about. However, if you obsess on past failures, you’ll miss the opportunities presented to you in the here and now.
Play the hand you are dealt
Sometimes I get the most random-looking hand that looks like it will result in nothing, and I think I might as well just give up. What I’ve found, however, is that getting a hand with a run and a matched set right off the bat limits what I can do with the unmatched cards, and that a hand that looks about as unmatched as you could possibility get with 52 cards turns out to have so much possibility that I end up winning, sometimes quite quickly. The point is to play the hand you are dealt. Stay focused, look for opportunity, enjoy the game.
Let go of the past
Sometimes I make a dumb mistake; discard a card I should have kept or draw something from the pile I didn’t really want. One time I had three kings and my fat fingers double tapped one of the kings instead of a nine that had no match. Clearly half the time, it works out for me even though I thought in retrospect it was a bad move. What that teaches me is to let go of the past. In Gin Rummy, what happened in the last game doesn’t at all affect what is going on in this game and discarding the wrong card can’t be taken back. In the above example, instead of three kings, I ended up with two separate 10-J-Q-K runs within the next couple of moves and won the hand.
Play your own game
Play offensively. Holding on to cards you think might help the other person in order to prevent them from winning is a losing strategy. Also, don’t hold on to bad inventory just because you are emotionally attached to it. You may really like aces, but collecting them could hurt your chances of getting other combinations. Let go of those pesky emotional attachments. Focus on opportunity instead of lack. In other words, if you have a pair of aces, look at them as assets. Try not to focus on the idea that you “need” another ace. You might pass up something better. Allow your business, personal life, hand of cards, etc. to evolve naturally. Not every hand is a winner, but again, if you play long enough and learn the rules and strategies of success, you can have a good time on the roller-coaster of life, and maybe even come out ahead.
Stay the course – don’t chase the shiny object
One of the strategies that I read said not to pull from the discard pile unless it completed or added to a set. If you have just one king in your hand and your opponent drops a king that doesn’t complete some other set in your hand, don’t pick it up. Go for the unknown in the draw pile. I’ve found that my hand comes together more quickly if I look at the early plan and then just stay the course. Say you’re dealt a pair of twos and a pair of fours, and you’re waiting for the third of each, but then you draw a three that creates a run. That might work out, or it might not. Over time though, chasing the next thing and switching strategies mid-course has to be done very deliberately. It’s best to develop your strategy and then stick to it. Keep the oldest cards; they’ll match up eventually. Of course, there’s no way to assess what would have happened if you’d switched strategies mid-stream, but when you do that, you pre-empt your initial intuitive course and chasing shiny objects is a never-ending pursuit.
Stay focused
So often, my opponent drops a card–say, a king–and I have just one king in my hand, but I immediately draw a king. It’s distracting. It happens often enough that I think there must be a glitch in the programming of this particular game. I don’t see it happen nearly that often when Katie and I are playing with a real deck. I shouldn’t care, because it’s just a silly game, but it takes my mind away from the present. It’s like a resentment. Then I miss something important and most of the time I don’t even notice that I missed something important. The only way I know that this is happening is because sometimes, going against rule #1, I grab a random card off the discard pile and it actually completes a set, even though I didn’t see that possibility in my hand. This tells me two things: (1) I am likely missing opportunities, and (2) my intuition is operating when I let it.
Go all in every once in a while
This is a personal preference for me. I don’t buy any chips, but the game gives out free chips every once in a while. I got up to almost 100,000 at one point, and then entered a few high-stakes games and lost it all. Currently I’m back up to over 40,000 and I’ll probably lose that at some point. Sometimes I bet conservatively, just 1,000 or so, and sometimes I just bet it all. I think that reflects my lifestyle and my world view. Going all in and losing it all can cause anxiety and be discouraging (game = mild, life = extreme) but it also teaches me that I am resilient and capable of comebacks. Playing the odds is safer and you can slowly build a nest egg, but risk and reward are also positively correlated in most things—especially those really worth doing. A well-reasoned long shot is much better, though, than closing your eyes and hoping for the best. If you have two nines in your hand and you passed up a nine earlier, and you’ve seen your opponent collect the 10 and the Jack of the suit you’re missing, you can reasonably predict that your opponent has the fourth nine and maybe you shouldn’t count on that to fill our your run.
So there they are; eight life lessons that pop up in my head when I’m relaxing with a game of gin or rummy or gin rummy or whatever the variations are called: learn by doing, luck evens out over time, play the hand you are dealt, let go of the past, play your own game, stay the course, stay focused, and go all in every once in a while. Oh, and number nine: don’t forget to have fun.
If you’re interested in playing the card games, see:
https://www.thesprucecrafts.com/oklahoma-gin-card-game-rules-412370
https://bicyclecards.com/how-to-play/500-rum/
p.s. since I wrote this I broke both arms skiing and after 12 years of public service the remainder of my law school student loans were forgiven and I am one of three finalists in the New Mexico Film Foundation screenplay contest sponsored by George R.R. Martin, so bad luck and good luck continue to accrue.