Lose money *and* weight, all in one!

I had some use-it-or-lose-it vacation time expiring in December, so I took a week off work. Usually, vacation days without plane tickets and an itinerary are a recipe for some serious couch-sittin', and when I rediscovered the PokerStars program on my home computer and started playing $1 No-Limit Texas Hold-'em tournaments, this break was looking to be a classic laze-a-thon. However, it didn't turn out quite that way, and today I'm in much better physical shape than I was two months ago. Here's how it happened.

The first day was bad. I played probably six tournaments over twelve hours, stopping from exhaustion at 3:00 a.m. It didn't help that I finished in the money the first time, and spent the next five tourneys failing to prove the first wasn't a fluke. But when I woke up the next day, rather than repeating the binge, I felt a twinge of guilt about the abuse that my slothlike habits were heaping on my body, and I did a curious thing: I dusted off the elliptical trainer in the corner of the living room, and worked out for 20 minutes.

Then it hit me: love poker, hate exercise. But poker bad, exercise good. So what... if... poker became a reward for exercise?

The rules are simple. I am now free to play poker all I want, without guilt. However, the price of entering a tournament (besides the $1.00 buy-in) is 20 minutes on the exercise machine. The house doesn't extend credit: I can't play and then promise to exercise later. But to encourage exercising even when I'm not in a poker mood, it's OK to bank exercise credits and redeem them later.

I've exercised almost every day since, sometimes twice a night when I'm still itching to play after getting knocked out when a fish moves in on me with 7s8c and catches two pair against my unimproved pocket aces. But the natural tension caused by coupling these two activities limits my ability to go overboard in either direction.

I know that the concept of rewarding work with play is hardly novel. But when properly applied, it's a marvelously effective way to introduce a needed virtue and an enjoyable vice into daily life.