White Tiger’s Lair

Last weekend we went hiking/snow shoeing/sledding in the Austrian Alps.  There were 8 of us so there was always someone to talk to and someone doing something silly or interesting.  Aside from spraining my ankle sledding back down the mountain (which should be really fun with my 5 week trip to India fast approaching) it was awesome, absolutely perfect weather.  We stayed at a “Huette”, basically and youth hostel way up in the mountains that sometimes have no electricity.  This one didn’t have warm water but was comparatively nice, they ran lights off PV and battery packs in the basement, the rooms were warmed by wood stoves and they had warm food (many don’t) which was cooked on this big old style wood oven. 

At night the 8 of us played a card game called “president and asshole”.  It is a fun game played with the high cards out of 4-5 decks of cards.  It requires a little bit of strategy and the objective is to be the first (or at least not the last) to get rid of all of your cards.  One aspect is that the person who did was last in the previous hand has to give their best card to the person who won, the person who won then gives them any card they want to.

I did fairly well in the game and when I gave the person a high card in return people thought I was crazy, why give away a high card.  Yes, normally high cards are a good thing, but with my hand it would have been like having a poker hand with four 7’s and getting rid of 2 because there were low cards.  Most of the people played “obvious moves” in other words they played just high cards one at time, not using just a little strategy to play groups of 3, 4, or 5 cards at a time.    It was just for fun and not competitive, but at the same time it was interesting that people thought I “just didn’t understand” an never looked for the bigger picture of how to gain control of the round and play out most of their cards.  (Yes, I won  =)

I wonder how much this simple game reflects life in general, where we generally don’t think about larger picture or interconnected systems, only what is directly in front of us…