I hope the poker craze is finally over. I haven’t seen a boring Texas Hold’em tournament in months. It might be because I don’t have cable and don’t watch TV but I hear things. I have my rear to the grapevine. It was told to me that gambling was becoming a problem among younsters because of all the coverage poker has been getting. But there are a few things that poker can teach us. Although I doubt those youngsters with gambling problems learn anything. How can someone claim to understand Kant and like Dave Mathews Band and Phish… I digress but shall revisit judgements of taste shortly.

The first thing poker should teach kids is that you don’t do dumb things. Like steal peoples bandwidth. You can rely on a strategy of doing dumb things and hoping for the best and it’ll sometimes work out and you’ll feel like a genius for a while, but don’t kid yourself. Doing dumb things is a policy that will cost you your shorts in the long run.

The wizards you see at the final tables in the poker tournaments on television often say dumb things and they sometimes surely look like they’re doing dumb things, like betting their entire pile on a lousy pair of fours; but what you don’t see is that they’ve just spent a grueling and monotonous couple of weeks doing thousands of smart things. They’ve been folding a mind-numbing series of bad cards into the muck, and they’ve done a great heap of mental math and of course they’ve bullied a lot of lousy hands into winners against uncertain and even frightened opponents. And they’ve gotten away with it.

So the second behavior the game teaches is that if you absolutely must do dumb things you must do them with great enthusiasm, at the right time and against the right opposition.

Which leads us to the third fundamental truth, which is that you must avoid situations where someone else can intimidate you by enthusiastically doing dumb things in your presence. This all applies to everyday life. Poker just illustrates it more concisely.

Now back to judgements of taste: The young people think that idiotically stupid lyrics represent their own thoughts because they sound deep. But they wouldn’t want to understand even if they could; although they would copy and paste the lyrics as their own words and use vocabulary stifling acronyms like OMWTF.

It is an utter lie and there is no other way to describe it. But the young people think they understand it. It’s on the blogosphere. But they are full of garbage; they’re in a garbage pit. And they’re dumb.

So the first rule is that you don’t be dumb, and the second rule is that if you do do it, do it with enthusiasm. Since you are violating the first rule but following the second, it is now up to you to practice the third, which means you stop stealing my bandwidth.