Abstract
Once upon a time there were a number of distinguished gentlemen who had been in the habit of playing a quiet game of bridge together at their club ever since their early youth. All of a sudden they learned from the club management that bridge was no longer to be played on the premises. The game was considered old-fashioned and it was giving the club a bad name. All other respectable clubs had changed over to poker, and the management had decided to follow suit. None of the bridge players were particularly familiar with poker, but they all found it extremely exciting to play. They started enthusiastically and soon found that lots of nice people came to join in. Thoroughly enjoying opportunities of the game, they began to bet aggressively. After a while they found that their new friends, and even some of their old ones, were betting even more aggressively. Since the point of the game seemed to be to get richer than any of the others, the players provoked each other to continually raise the stakes. Who could sit quietly by, when markers were piling up in front of the others? However, quite suddenly several of the new players said good-bye to the former bridge players, who were feeling very happy about their huge heaps of markers. But their happiness was suddenly destroyed by management’s announcement that the markers were worthless, and that the former bridge players owed the club a fortune for the money it had provided for the poker game. Some of the players even had to give up their club membership.
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Engwall, L. (1994). Bridge, Poker and Banking. In: Fair, D.E., Raymond, R. (eds) The Competitiveness of Financial Institutions and Centres in Europe. Financial and Monetary Policy Studies, vol 28. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8350-3_14
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