At least, I thought I did.

I play poker at a few different places depending on my schedule, and at one particular room there's a player I run into fairly regularly.

I don't like him.

There. I said it.

I like to think I'm generally an enjoyable person to have at a poker table. I'm friendly. I treat the dealers well. I make reasonably decent dad jokes that occasionally get a laugh.

Not a lot.

But every now and then.

I've even been known to give an opponent a subtle hint that maybe they should fold when I'm holding the nuts and about to take the rest of their money.

I'm basically a humanitarian.

But this guy?

Different story.

For reasons I could never quite figure out, this guy seemed to have it in for me.

Every time I raised, there he was.

Call.

Never quite good enough to re-raise me. Just good enough to make sure he was coming along.

Again.

Here we go.

Raise. Call.

Of course.

Raise. Call.

This guy.

And somehow, whenever we ended up playing a pot together, it felt like he always found whatever card he needed.

If he needed a flush, he’d hit it. If he needed a straight, he’d hit it. If he needed some ridiculous two-pair combination that no reasonable human being should have still been holding...

There it was.

And slowly, without ever realizing it, I created an explanation.

He was targeting me.

I had no idea why. Maybe I had beaten him in a big pot once. Maybe I had said something that irritated him. Maybe one of my dad jokes had finally broken him.

Whatever the reason, this guy had decided that when I sat down at the table, his mission was apparently to make my evening miserable.

So naturally, I began treating him differently too.

I didn't particularly want to talk to him. I didn't joke around with him. And when we were in a hand together, I wanted to beat him.

Badly.

That last part matters. Because somewhere along the way, I stopped simply trying to make good decisions against him.

I started trying to beat him.

There's a difference.

I chased a little more. Called a little lighter. Stayed in a few pots longer than I probably should have. Sometimes I wanted to prove he couldn't push me around. Sometimes I just desperately wanted the satisfaction of finally dragging a pot while he watched the chips come my direction.

And when those decisions went badly?

Well, that only proved my original theory.

See? This guy always gets me. My nemesis.

Then one day I saw him at the grocery store.

No. It can't be him.

It was.

Apparently dominating me at the poker table wasn't enough. Now he had followed me into produce.

Great. He'll probably grab the last of something I want. Maybe cut me off in the checkout line. Find some way to get one over on me here too.

Then we made eye contact.

Don't come over here.

He started walking toward me.

Please don't come over here.

He came over.

"Hey, don't you play poker a lot?"

I summoned all of the enthusiasm available to me.

"Yeah."

Then he smiled.

"Man, you are great to play with. You always make me laugh."

Wait. What?

And then he said something I absolutely wasn't expecting. He told me he was always happy when he saw me at the table because he knew I'd bring the best out of him.

And suddenly my nemesis disappeared.

Not the person. The story.

Because standing in the middle of a grocery store, I realized I had created an entire relationship with this man that apparently existed only in my head.

The calls were real. The hands were real. The losses were certainly real.

But everything I had built around them?

Maybe not.

He called my raises frequently, and I decided he was targeting me. He played hard against me, and I decided he disliked me. He won some memorable pots against me, and I decided he always beat me.

There may even have been moments when some of that interpretation was true. But I had taken a handful of observations, filled in everything I didn't know, and eventually turned my assumptions into facts.

Then I did something worse.

I started making decisions based on them.

That's the part that stayed with me. Because the story I told myself about him changed the way I played against him. And the way I played against him probably helped create some of the outcomes I was using as evidence that the story was true.

He calls me too much. He's targeting me. I need to beat him. I play differently. I make worse decisions. He beats me.

See? I knew it.

That's a pretty impressive little machine when you think about it.

And poker isn't the only place we build one.

Beyond the Table

Someone doesn't respond to a message. Someone challenges our idea in a meeting. A friend seems distant. A coworker's tone changes. Someone doesn't invite us.

We observe something real.

Then comes the dangerous part.

We explain why it happened.

And somewhere between the observation and the explanation, we can forget that one is a fact and the other is a story.

Sometimes the story is right. Sometimes it isn't.

The problem is that we often start making decisions as though we've already proven it.

I don't know that my grocery encounter magically made me enjoy playing pots against this guy.

I'm not sure that's even the point.

What it did was remind me that the person sitting across the table and the person I had constructed in my head weren't necessarily one and the same. And if I'm going to make good decisions, I need to know which one I'm reacting to.

Because for quite a while, I wasn't playing poker against him. I was playing against my nemesis.

Turns out, that guy never existed.

The CheckDark Principle

It's easy to mistake the story for the person.

Notice what you observed. Notice what you added to it.

Then ask which one you're actually reacting to.

Sometimes the story will be true. Sometimes it won’t.

Either way, find clarity before you decide.

Play against the person across the table. Not the one in your head.

Poker teaches it. Life proves it.