Raising the Stakes: An Internal Motivator

I’ve enjoyed playing poker for as long as I can remember, having been introduced to the game by uncles at family gatherings when I was a kid. I haven’t played in years though, so when a neighbor organized a friendly game over the recent holiday break, I eagerly accepted his invite.

A group of us gathered in his basement on a bitterly cold night a few days before Christmas and played for nearly six hours. Despite the fact that I walked home with empty pockets, I had a lot of fun. 

But halfway through the night it dawned on me that the fun I was having had very little to do with the game we were playing, which hardly resembled poker as I know it. 

Poker is a game of incomplete information—unlike chess or checkers—which means your cards can have wildly diverging values depending on what cards other players are holding or how they bet. In order to win, you must constantly assess the risk and reward of staying in each hand, make educated guesses as to what your opponents are holding, and make bets accordingly.

Simply put, in poker the best cards don’t always win.

Unless of course no one ever folds.

Being a friendly game amongst neighbors, our buy-in that night was not a lot of money. The low stakes meant that everyone was more than willing to keep pushing chips into the pot until the bitter end of virtually every hand—even if the cards they were dealt weren’t initially promising.

This resulted in plenty of excitement and good-natured screaming as poor hands turned into winners as more cards were dealt, but it meant that no real skill was involved. The stakes weren’t high enough for any of us to worry about losing all of our chips, so almost every bet was called. For the most part, whoever randomly drew the best cards won. 

Keeping the stakes low made some sense for a game where the ultimate goal was camaraderie, but as much fun as it was, there has already been a push to increase the buy-in next time.

So many things in life can be improved by raising the stakes.

Easy, meaningless work can be fun for awhile if you like the people or the salary, but eventually it will get old. Talking about that product you are going to launch or the business you are going to start is certainly less terrifying than actually doing it, but also far less rewarding. And good luck building significant, lasting relationships when you aren’t fully committed and therefore don’t have a lot to lose. 

When you increase the importance of what’s at stake you become more focused, more creative, and more driven.

You might even have more fun.

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