The lessons we can learn from the game of Poker
Poker players measure a session in hands, not hours, because hands are what actually run out. Working people measure time the opposite way — in deadlines, calendars, and years until retirement. The late game asks for a third measure, and it is the honest one: count your time in occasions. Not years in the abstract, but the number of times you are likely to do the specific things you love, with the specific people you love, while you are still able to do them.
The exercise is simple, and the book offers it without flinching. Suppose you are sixty-five and your grandchildren live in another state, and you visit them twice a year. How many more visits are you likely to have? The arithmetic takes ten seconds: twice a year across twenty years is forty. But now count it the way life will actually deal it. The granddaughter who is eight today will be eighteen in ten years — so the childhood version of those visits, the ones with the small voice and the bedtime story, numbers about twenty. Twenty is not an abstraction. Twenty is a number you can hold in your head while you decide whether this year’s trip can be postponed.
Run the same count on the trips. If you love traveling abroad but expect, realistically, that long trips will grow difficult by your early eighties, then the window from sixty-five holds perhaps fifteen or sixteen years — and life will cancel some of those years for reasons of its own. A dozen real trips, give or take. Run it on the old friend you keep meaning to reconnect with: the count there is limited by two lifespans, not one, and it shrinks from both ends. Every “someday” item on your list has a number attached to it. The only choice is whether you learn the number while it can still change your plans.
The numbers are almost always smaller than we assume. That is not a reason for gloom, and I want to be careful here, because the point is nearly the opposite. Time is the one chip that cannot be bought back, borrowed, or won from the player across the table. Every other stack in this book can be rebuilt — money re-earned or reallocated, health improved at the margins, people stacks replenished. An occasion is different. A missed visit is not stored somewhere awaiting a better season. It is simply a hand you did not play, and the deck does not offer it twice.
In my years of practice I read estate files the way other men read box scores, and the saddest entries were never financial. They were the good intentions: the trip always planned for the year after next, the reconciliation letter drafted and never sent, the brother who was going to get a call. None of those men and women ran out of money. They ran out of occasions, and because they never counted, they spent their time chips the way careless players spend money chips — as if the stack refilled itself.
Counting changes behavior in exactly the small places where the late game is actually played. The visit gets scheduled this year instead of next. The trip jumps the queue ahead of the kitchen remodel. The phone call to the old friend happens this week, while both of you can still make it. And the count works in the other direction too: it tells you which occasions are plentiful and can be shared generously, and which are scarce and deserve to be protected from the calendar’s routine thieves — the obligations you accept out of habit and would not choose again on purpose.
There is one more count worth making, and it belongs to someone else. Your grandchild’s childhood has a count. Your oldest friend’s good years have a count. When you show up, you are spending your occasions and theirs at the same time, which makes showing up the highest-value bet at the whole table.
Here is the takeaway. Take one page and count three things in writing: the visits, the trips, and the people — the realistic number of occasions you have left for each of the things you say matter most. Then take the smallest number on the page and put it on this year’s calendar, acted on first, before the plentiful things get their turn. Do not let the count sadden you. Let it aim you. A player who knows how many hands remain plays every one of them like it matters — because he finally knows how much it does.
