Don’t bluff an idiot, especially a rich one

How to negotiate if you’re not on the same page — or feeling the same pain

Suppose you and I were playing poker and you thought you had the better hand, but weren’t confident about it. If I bet $1, you’d probably call (match my bet), right? What if it were $10? $100? $1,000? Add enough zeroes and one of us would eventually lose our shirt or our chutzpah.

If you play poker — or watch closely — you’ll learn a lot about life. I gave a few examples four years ago that still hold up:

Now here are four questions for a new deal of blather:

Are you playing the same game?

Suppose I bet $100 in our opening example. If you were earning minimum wage, it would almost certainly scare you off. If you were a billionaire, though, I could bet $1 million and you wouldn’t even blink. (I would, however, be whimpering in the fetal position.)

As a young reporter on a medium-size newspaper centuries ago, I wanted to go to a writing conference. I offered to pay my own cross-country airfare and hotel costs if the company would give me the two days off with pay. My editor was all for it. The publisher wasn’t. “We assume that you know how to write,” he said.

Just like the minimum-wager and the billionaire, the perspectives were so vastly different that there wasn’t any point in negotiating. If you’re stuck with a losing hand, realize it and move on.

But some wins and losses aren’t so absolute. Last year’s World Series of Poker Main Event had more than 10,000 participants paying the $10,000 entry fee. One of them, Jonathan Tamayo, walked away with $10 million. But more than 1,500 players won at least $15,000, more than covering the entry fee.

You might not become the CEO or even the Employee of the Month, but lots of people succeed by piling up one victory after another. If you’re conscientious and continually build your skills and relationships, you’ll win, even if you don’t wind up with a gold bracelet or gold watch.

Are you good at reading people?

Nearly half a century ago, Kenny Rogers had a hit song about a poker player, with lines like:

He said, "Son, I've made a life
Out of reading people’s faces
And knowing what their cards were
By the way they held their eyes”

You might develop a hundred job skills over the years, but the best career skill you’ll ever have is the ability to read people. What motivates them? What are they best at? Do they have a sense of humor? Do you want them on your team? How far do you trust them? How would you get around them if you had to?

Most of these questions are crucial for personal relationships, too (romantic or platonic). They’re not first date questions, certainly, but you need those answers if you want to get from tryst to trust.

Maybe you could even bluff our poker-playing billionaire — not by threatening their money, but their pride. If a person is ultra-competitive (and lots of rich people are), their hatred of losing can overcome everything else.

And while you’re doing all this people reading, check out a few pages of your autobiography, too. You might learn something.

Can you set up a bluff?

Poker pros love to play suited connectors — like the 10 and Jack of diamonds. They offer all sorts of possibilities for straights and flushes that can win big pots. And if you’re known to play suited connectors, they can help you bluff when you’ve got nothing.

Work can be like that, too. If you become the office expert in a software program, artificial intelligence, local restaurants, whatever, it might give you clout in something completely unrelated. If you carry the aura of authority well, the world is your oyster and others will clam up.

Is someone pot committed?

This is as crazy of a poker video as you will ever see. One guy has an ace-high flush — a hand that can be beaten only with a miraculous pair of (nearly) suited connectors. So guess what happens?

The player with the ace is pot committed, meaning that he has bet so much that he will basically match any raise. It would be easier to bluff our billionaire.

But the other guy raises him anyway. And a whole lot of soul searching ensues.

We get pot committed in life, too, usually through acts of trust: You relocate for a new job, you take a step back in your career to support your partner, you let your spouse run the Netflix account.

If someone does that for you, the stakes have already been raised. It’s not the time for a bluff.

Murphy Slaw

Something old: When a priest, a minister and a rabbi walk into a bar, you know a punchline is coming. But George Wendt could do that all by himself. As Norm Peterson in “Cheers,” Wendt poured out punchlines by the pitcher. Here’s a keg’s worth from Cheers’ one-man holy trinity, who died this week at age 76:

And a chaser:

Something new: Our lesson for the week:

Something borrowed: If you need your spirits lifted, consider this Nike ad from one of the grimmest times of the century, also known as five years ago.

Something blue: You know you’re old when you read about a pretty woman’s sex life and all you can think about is math. Consider this story about Australian OnlyFans star Annie Knight, who said she slept with 583 men in six hours.

Now wait a minute. Or 1.62 men, which math says is how many men Knight slept with in her typical 60 seconds. That means each man had an average of 37 seconds.

I can’t go through an ATM that fast. Even with a quick withdrawal.