Losing $3,000 to impress someone

If you want to see a message board thread that captures the essense of.... something, check this out.

It started with this challenge:

I am laying down a challenge for all of those people willing to blow 20k on blackjack. This will be much more fun.

The rules:
-you must play 100 hands of LIMIT poker
-you must play EVERY single hand to the river
-you must have a PFR of over 40% and an aggression factor over 1
-any limits are allowed (.25/5 to 1 billion dollars/2 billion dollars)
-this must be in a single session
-graphs and stats must be posted for you to compete in this challenge

Seems pretty stupid, but basically just some goofy fun.

Until some kid decided to do this at $5/10 and dropped almost $3,000.

So then some people started pointing out how completely insane it is that he deliberately lost thousands of dollars just to make a funny post on a message board. This kid had made over $100,000 in February playing poker, so having a little fun and losing $3,000 in an hour probably seemed like a good idea to him. Of course the rest of us realize that spending that on a week vacation at the beach would probably be a lot more fun.

So there were a bunch of "wasting that much money is crazy" vs "its not that much money to him" posts. Lots of people just telling the $3,000 kid how awesome he is. Then some kid from my University of Maryland made some great points I think, and people gave him all kinds of shit for it, although a few agreed with him:

• Hes a young kid who recently came across much more money then he is accustomed to. I am sure he is extrapolating his new found success into being a billionaire at 40. The idea that he is willing to blow 3k to simply say "look at me" shows an extreme amount of information about his personality, imo. Someone's value of an activity or object can be grossly skewed especially temporarily. The idea that the value of everything being self-deciding just doesn't hold that much water as an argument on a number of levels.
• A better analogy would be to watch a wealthy businessman go to the center of town and light money on fire, while his yes-men cream their pants.
• you don't realize how insulated many of you are within a community you have emerged yourself into. Its akin to body builder's approval of steroids, nazis approval of anti-semitism, and the like. The groupthink becomes an unfortunate byproduct of this forum.
• it easy to become so close-minded when no one is telling you anything different. Its detrimental to your growth, so its pretty unfortunate.
• I just think it is so scary that a 20 year old kid starts making a lot of money, and the first thing he wants to do is blow 3k to impress people he does not know. If you are going to waste 3k get a pound of weed or a sick plasma tv screen. You can donate it or give it to a friend that needs it.

Somebody else wrote:

it's really sick what poker can do to our sense of monetary value. our hourly swings can be 10-15 times our hourly earn, so the money seems to be so much less valuable. compound that with someone who ran super hot for a while and the money almost has no significance. but there's a time when we will all run bad and it sucks to think back at that money you could've had.

That is another great point. I lost $1,500 yesterday and won $1,000 tonight, so it can be easy to be distracted from the fact that an hour of poker is worth about $30 to me. Playing this game for a living really fucks with your mind.