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Why Bluffing is Good For You (And how history proves it!)
For centuries, many religious groups have condemned card games such as poker for a variety of reasons. First, it’s possible to lose your car, your house, and everything else you own if things get out of hand. It’s true that depending on the size of the game you get yourself involved in, that can and does happen – even to smart, experienced players.
But the second biggest reason poker has gotten such a bad rap for so many generations is that the whole game is based on a very ancient art: The bluff. Basically, you try to make the other guy think you’ve got something you don’t. To the church, that’s a deception, and therefore a sin. But history has proven that the “bluff” is really something that is vital for survival, and it does play a role in promoting good and defeating evil in our society.
For a really good example of this, consider recent U.S. history.
In 1945, when the new U.S. President Harry S. Truman was told that America had a couple of atomic bombs he could now use against Japan, Truman was shrewd enough not to let the Japanese know that all the U.S. military had in its arsenal was simply “two” bombs (some theories exist that there was at least one more bomb available at the time).
In the three days in August of that year between the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Truman made sure the Japanese knew that the U.S. was prepared to unleash this incredibly destructive force in not two or three places, but instead all over Japan. Had the Japanese known that there were only two or three bombs in the U.S. arsenal that were ready to go, they might have held off even longer on their surrender pledge – gambling that either (a) we couldn’t make any more or (b) that even if we could make more it would take us a while, and perhaps Japan could figure out a way to strike back – somehow.
Instead, imagine for a moment what the Japanese leadership must have thought after the first bomb dropped on Hiroshima. They surely must have imagined that if they didn’t do something – fast – Truman was going to decimate their nation. The utter destruction wouldn’t stop with Nagasaki. Next would be Kokura, Niigata, Tokyo, Yokohama, and the list would go on. Up to that point in the war, the Japanese had committed themselves to becoming a suicidal nation, using “Kamikaze” flights to crash into the decks of U.S. aircraft carriers. But that was individual pilots killing themselves. It’s very different when you “Kamikaze” entire cities and hundreds of thousands die in an instant instead of just one pilot. The Japanese must have realized that not only were they going to lose the war, but both their race and culture were probably going to be completely wiped out.
So they surrendered – to a bluff. They called it quits after two bombs were dropped. The U.S. government had two cards in its hand, and played them extremely well.
Despite the fact that any use of such technology is tragic, those two atomic bombs saved the lives of millions of American soldiers, as well as millions of Japanese that would have surely been killed as a result of the impending American invasion tentatively scheduled for the fall of 1945.
The invasion never happened, and the Japanese surrendered.
Harry Truman bluffed – and won.
That was probably the best poker game ever played.
