Does God play Poker?

I had a dream last night. Usually I don’t remember dreams, but this one I did, or at least what feels like just a few key seconds of it. In those few seconds I became aware of how much like life the game of Poker is.

In Poker, as with business and indeed life itself, you have to be able to sell yourself, you have to persuade everyone else to buy into the idea that they are getting a good deal. In business as in Poker, success is achieved through a good strategy; it’s not luck, it’s just good planning and management.

What was really strange about the dream was that I found the word Poker has the same number of letters as the world Bible. A revelation ain’t it?!! I also was told in this dream that the letters in each word relate to each other, for example p to b, o to i and so on.

I’ve no idea where this all came from, besides the fact that I play Poker online a bit. Was it just much my imagination ‘letting off extra steam’ completely randomly? I decided to do a quick search online for the elements of the dream.

I didn’t find any correlation of the letters, but in my search I found this blog entry here about Job. Job? Isn’t that what everyone does?! I also found an article called Selling and Poker. Maybe the dream was directing me to find both these webpages. In life there are many numerical coincidences, but really there are too many coincidences in the Selling and Poker article for it to be mere ‘chance’.

Perhaps the dream was to lead me to the possiblity that Poker is a form of Satan, however that doesn’t necessarily mean that Satan or Poker is bad, it simply means that Satan/Poker teaches people that if you do not learn and plan your strategy, then you lose.

Personally I don’t believe in God or Satan, but I do believe in instincts and intuition which I believe is partly the same thing as God (the other part being your strongest positive or negative beliefs, effectively directing God’s actions for or against you). Maybe centuries ago people were taught to believe in God as a metaphor to help them to develop their instincts. They believed and passed on to future generations what they were taught out of a need to belong, but back then people were less educated about the world and society and took the metaphor too literally and developed a belief in a seperate individual entity, an individual over whom they had no influence, an individual whom they could use as a means of escaping the problems caused by not listening to their intuition. People are more than happy to talk to God, but what really matters is the ability to listen to God; to listen to your intuition, instincts and subconscious.

A lot of people playing Poker online for real money lose real money. The bible states that the love of money, or an obssesion with Mammon, is the root of all evil. Money has been proven many times to not make people happier because they are the same person, and sometimes it makes them unhappy due to wanted attention and therefore escapism. Maybe the answer is to live intuitively and therefore identify that which you will do for nothing… but nothing is not valued. So if whatever you do is valued, it must be charged for. In Poker the amount charged is relevant to yor skill and is your winnings.

In the blog entry mentioned above, God and Satan abuse Job. Maybe that is exactly what happens with most people in life and failure to learn the reasons why bad things happen to good people continues the abuse with things like disease and unhappiness. If we keep acting like Job, instead of taking action doing what we really want to do, then maybe we’ll continue getting what Job continues to get.