SOTU and Poker

Years ago, I figured out how to play poker the right way. Up to that point, I was playing foolishly and not with the odds.

In poker, if your hand sucks at the deal, you have two options: Bluff, or fold. The decision should be based on the knowledge you gained of the other players.

If they're amateurs, they'll bluff all the way to the last bet, even though the odds are against them. With those type of players, you just fold, wait for the next hand and take advantage of their ignorance. If you play them right, you'll have most of their chips in a few hands. Even if they have a good hand, the good players bow out, leaving them only the ante, or a little more.

If they're good players, you can take the chance of a bluff, but only to the point you know they're either playing a better hand, or you know the odds are against you. The odds say you'll have better cards in a future hand, which will give you the opportunity to win. That's when you fold.

So, how does this pertain to the State of the Union Address? The President played his best hand a few days ago, which was releasing the talking points. From what I've seen, it wasn't a bluff, so he could use other talking points during the speech. That would have required the President to have the capability to speak without a teleprompter, some really good material and the fuzzies to pull such a stunt.  He's never shown he has such capabilities, so he was hoping to build support for his ideas, which are losing support daily.

To add to this bad poker player analogy, news reports yesterday stated the President was going to issue an executive order to raise the minimum wage on future government contracts. That's holding on to a pair of deuces, with the hope another will pop up. Unfortunately, few wage requirements in government contracts come anywhere close to just minimum wage. The wages are much higher, most people know this and he was betting again on a bluff.

The SOTU address was the last round of bets. In the hope of gaining support, he blathered the usual hollow words, avoided leadership, by admitting his failures and his new plan is to waste money by traveling around the country in the hope of gaining support. I can see mostly empty halls in his near future. Words don't replace lost wages, insurance and the desperation of knowing the next few years promise to be as bad as the last five.

So, he's all in, with a bad hand. The odds say he's lost all his chips and the odds are usually right.