The other morning my husband laughed so hard that he almost spit out his coffee when he narrated an episode of Two and a Half Men. Take a moment and imagine Charlie Harper, the full ball -to-wall character played by Charlie Sheen, sitting across from you at the poker table. PLEASE … invite me to THAT game!

Here’s the story: Coming home drunk from the card room, Charlie said to his brother Alan, “You know how easy Texas Hold’em looks on television when you can see all the hole cards? Well, at the casino, they don’t let you see other people’s cards, and it’s not that easy. I dropped $8,000, and I threw up in my mouth three times. ”

What makes this simple card game so complicated? Played with two private cards in your hand plus five community cards face up, it seems very simple.

In fact, as long as you are in the hand at showdown and turn your cards over for the dealer to read, you don’t even need to know you have a winning hand. In Texas Hold’em, as with any other poker, your cards do the talking.

Of course good cards help, they help a lot, but I’ve seen so many people play great cards that they’re wasting opportunities to maximize the profit potential of those cards. It’s as if they turned their hole cards face up and placed them on their foreheads for all the other players to see.

On the other hand, I’ve seen poker pros play weak cards as if they were aces. Doyle Brunson, the Godfather of Poker, won back-to-back world poker championships in 1976 and 1977, holding only 10, 2. That hand is now even. has a nickname: The Brunson.

The complexity in Texas Hold’em stems from the simple fact that, by our very nature, we are complex humans. We come to the poker table with our bags full of our life experiences, which then, in turn, influence every decision we make at the poker table.

At the same time, as we sat down at the poker table, something almost mystical happened. The rest of our lives are somehow out of focus, and we can detach ourselves from what’s happening ‘out there’. The game of poker can really give us a break from our daily lives while providing an opportunity to train our brain, our intuitive sense, and learn new skills.