The one rule in poker is that you always judge every hand using three pieces of information: your chance of winning that hand at that exact moment, the amount you could win (the size of the pot), and how much it will cost you to stay in. You never let yourself be blinded by how much of your money is in the pot, or how much you’ve lost to previous pots, or how badly you want to win, or anything else. If your odds of winning, times the total pot, is less then the bet, you fold.

Right now our “pot” in Iraq is marginal stability for a few years in an isolated, though oil-filled, region. The bet every day is a few more American lives, and we keep taking it. That pot will never pay out, but we keep anteing up like the new guy at the table who wants to take every hand all the way to the end because he just knows that jack is going to fall. “I’ve already put so much into this pot, what’s another 20 bucks even though all I’ve got is King high?” At that point though, you just have to get over it. Maybe staying in at the beginning of the hand was the best course to take given the information at the time; maybe you were being careless. It doesn’t matter at that point. Take the loss and put that money on the next hand that you actually have a chance of winning.