Pay It Forward. You all remember the movie right? To this day I still think it’s probably one of the saddest movies ever. But the story and the concept of Pay It Forward was fantastic. The idea has kind of gone by the way-side. I mean, when was the last time you did something for someone and just smiled and said “don’t pay me back, pay it forward” and went about your day truly not expecting anything good in return (except for probably the happy feeling you got from being a do-gooder)?
Well, last night Mike and I were invited by a college friend of ours to play in his Pay It Forward poker tournament. The catch was that there was no buy in. None of the players had to put in a single cent to be able to play. Our friend, John, instead was going to give the winner $500 to use to “pay it forward” in whatever way they wanted. Pretty incredible, right? We all get to have fun all night with nothing on the line, and in the end the winner gets to give away free money to make someone else’s day!
But then it got interesting. When we got there, John told us there was a twist and pulled out six envelopes. He said I will show you what is in one of the envelopes, but you have to decide as a group which envelope you want to see. So we chose envelope #3…and there was $400 inside envelope #3. We’re all wondering did we get lucky and choose the jackpot envelope and the rest all have $10’s and $20’s?? Unfortunately, Mike got out of the tournament pretty quickly. I held my own for awhile, but I didn’t quite get to the final table. But Mike and I had to see this thing out! So player #6 got a $100 bill. Player #5 $200. Player #4 $300, and we already knew Player #3 was getting $400. So at this point we’re pretty clear on the sequence, but then John said “wait around there’s one more twist.” So now it’s down to two players and it’s way too late in the morning, so they push all in on the next hand. Player #2 opens his envelope and it’s $500 just as we expected. Then Player #1 opens his envelope and he’s sitting there counting out one hundred dollars bills for what seems like forever (it was realllly past my bedtime at this point) and finally reveals ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS!! (That’s $1,000 for those of you that speak in numbers vs. letters.) We were all shocked. The total prize winnings for the night totaled $2,500. And the grand prize winner announced that he would be donating half of it to St. Jude’s and the other half to buy soccer uniforms for a local soccer team that could really use the donation.
Even though the game ended really late, by the time I got into bed, I could hardly sleep thinking about what I had witnessed that night. And it really got me thinking. Mike and I had a fantastic idea for what we were going to do with the money if we won it. Now I’m kinda thinking maybe we should just do it anyway with our own money on the line. And I know that’s all that John wanted. Was to inspire all of us to remember to give forward.
And just because posts are never complete without pictures, here’s one that the incredibly adorable Jamie Delaine took of us in Vegas last week. I LOVE Mike’s new shoes, and I could wear these boots every single day.
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