Nice girls don�t get angry. Nice girls don�t play poker, either. Because poker and anger go together like gasoline and high prices. Look, I�m pretty nice.� I hold the door for strangers.� I treat my opponents with courtesy. I let drivers merge into my lane.� The bitterest words to cross my lips at a live poker table so far are �Oh, this is ridiculous.�

In the privacy of my home, with none but my monitor to hear, I�ve occasionally dropped an expletive.� But I was raised by the kind of parents who said �Ow!� when they hit their thumb with a hammer. I don�t have the habit of strong language.
Bad housekeeping, yes, bad language, no.

My life outside poker invites my anger relatively seldom. Even my recent fury at Senator Frist and the rest of the US Congress over the passage of the Unlawful Online Gambling language � in a backhanded, hypocritical, and secretive fashion � was really poker related.

When they abridged due process for suspected friends of terrorists and gave our morally bankrupt president the authority to decide what is and isn�t torture, I shook my head in cynical weariness. They�ve legislated to constrict my ability to play online poker?� Suddenly I was white-hot. Where do they get off?� How does the party that claims to stand for more freedom and less government rationalize this regulation-bloating restriction of citizen activities?� How do they look themselves in the mirror claiming online poker is a greater social ill than live poker or online lotteries?

I was furious.� I spent an entire day binging on chocolate, and spread my protest in the blogosphere. I complained to my family with enough vigour that several Republican voters agreed that this time they had gone too far.� Really, you�d think the torture thing would have been more worth my ire. But it was the poker that hooked me.

Which goes to show that anger is irrational. When it�s doing its job, it warns that our boundaries have been broached.� Appropriate anger impelled me from a job where the boss called me �Babe� in one sentence and then belittled my competence and intelligence in the next.� Anger pushes me to proxy activism � sending money and support to the causes I believe in � and removed me from bad friends and bad teachers who would have done me more harm had I stayed around.� It has its place.

And it also fuels some of the most expensive and embarrassing poker blow-outs ever seen. Of all the emotions of poker, anger is the classic. The most dramatic. The number one source of steam and tilt, the center of the most retold stories, the lurker at the edge of the room, waiting to decimate a stack.

Poker invites anger � and then punishes it by taking our chips. We play with money � and for many if not most, money feels like survival. So poker hooks our survival instinct. Poker creates winners and losers, so it hooks our competitive streak. And when poker�s randomness lets a weak hand overcome a much stronger starter, it hooks our desire for justice. If we succumb to the invitation, we lose.� It's almost as if poker was built to teach the value of stoicism. Or to test emotional self-control through the ups and downs.
Well, sometimes I fail the test. At least I know it is a test. So I have the chance to look at my test results, and decide what I want to do about them.

I will send more gentle blessings again when I am more peaceful. Today, I send this, especially to those who will least enjoy it:� May you receive a clear view of your own faults.

Blogging since 2002 at http://paradoxworld.blogspot.com/