How Online Poker Became My Pandemic Self-Care
Millions of people have lost their jobs during this period of economic downturn. I am one of them. If you’ve never been laid off before, it sucks. I spent the few hours after the Bad Conference Call in a state of numb shock, an inability to think concrete thoughts disturbed only by the occasional sense that that the past two years I’d spent at my job had been a waste. And so, with nothing to do and a whole lot of newly free time with which to do it, I decided to start playing online poker . Call it a self-flagellatory instinct: I’d just been brutally and arbitrarily punished by the free market, so it was high time to jump into a game that Danish economist Ole Bjerg refers to as a “parody of capitalism.” I had never really played before, I’m bad at math, and the one skill I picked up as a journalist that could potentially translate to poker success—an ability to read people—was negated by the fact that I was sitting in front of a computer screen. But this was the early stages of coronav