CUT THE DECK & START DEALING!

The ultimate American game...? No, it's not baseball. Nor football. It's poker. No-limit, table-stakes poker!

This is the very reasonable conclusion drawn by James McManus in "The Chronicle of Higher Education." He argues that, "in addition to being a superb networking tool, poker is educational, teaching its players how to assess risks and other people's thought processes."

Among some of our better poker players have been Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon and Bill Gate. When he was a student at Harvard, Gates claims he learned more about business in his all-night poker games than he ever did in business school. Being a professional loser myself, it's not hard to understand how good Seven-Card-Stud players can become damn good entrepreneurs.

Then there's Draw Poker -- the game preferred in the Old West. Doc Holliday, Bat Masterson and Billy the Kid were fearsome players. Wild Bill Hickok was too until he was shot in the back while drawing. The essence of Draw Poker is very much the essence of all risk-taking. You get the chance to completely change your odds right in the middle of the game. However, always at the enormous risk of losing everything you held.

McManus and social historians point out that all-or-nothing risk-taking like this is in the national DNA. Why else would you uproot your life and travel to a raw new continent? Once here and settled in the East, why else would you uproot again to venture into the uncharted mines and forests of a Wild West?

Start with some of the East's Yankee values of diligence and self control, mix it with the covered wagon lust for land and gold. There it is! Then and now, life is a poker game, and a poker game is life. No matter our age or our stage, we all have a seat at the table.

So cut the deck and start dealing....!