Definition: Given a real-life anecdote of a complex ethical situation, generate a suitable title that describes the main event/root cause of the situation. Imagine that the given text is a social media post, and you have to write the title of the post, so the users can decide to read the main text or not.
Input: Plot twist- not a throwaway! 

Cut to this evening. My friend FakeName and I, two poor college kids, are hanging out without anything to do. He just learned to play Texas Hold Em poker so we decided to sit down and play for a bit. At the beginning, we didn’t play any stakes, just for fun. 

Now I don’t want to toot my horn or anything, but I know what I’m doing when I play poker. I’ve studied the statistics, game theory strategy, and played a lot online and live. I’m not like a god or anything but I really enjoy it and have put a decent amount of time into improving my play. 

So when FakeName suggested put some skin in the game, I happily agreed. It wasn’t anything crazy, just whoever wins gets a drink from the loser. He won the first game, and we upped the prize pool to two drinks. We went back and forth like this for a few games (1 on 1 they lasted 10-20 minutes each). 

Eventually I started to pull away. FakeName is very new to the game, and he was making all the amateur mistakes. He only bet when he felt good about his hand, and he called my bets way too much when he was “just hoping for that one card to come out!” He had some physical tells too- big eyes when his card came, fingering his chips when he just couldn’t wait to bet. In other words- very easy to exploit. 

This is where I feel bad. Instead of stopping while I was marginally ahead (2-3 drinks), I said yes when he asked the chance to go double or nothing. I won. I said I was willing to let him go double or nothing until he won or we was ready to stop; before we know it, an hour has gone by and he’s down 40 drinks. Yeah, 40. That’s like $200 and waaay more than we should have been wagering given our stations in life. 

What makes it worse is that we had joked earlier that we were both the kind of people who couldn’t give up on a bad thing- that if we found ourselves in a hole we had the tendency to dig ourselves deeper trying to get out. Then two hours later the exact thing has happened to him, with me knowingly profiting off of his bad decisions. 

I know FakeName is a grown adult and he hopefully learned a good lesson, but I can’t help but feel like I should have kept it from getting to where it did. He’s definitely going to want to pay me what he technically owes even though I don’t really care enough to try and enforce a dumb debt like that. 

AITA?





playing poker with my friend