EP206, David Hench: A Poker Player Rolls the Synchronicity Dice

Poker players create coincidences. They play with random chance. Some can tilt the card shuffle in their direction while carefully playing by the rules. David Hench has survived the odds and now tells us about his coincidence-filled life of chance, statistics and poker cards.     Connecting with Coincidence with Bernard Beitman, MD (CCBB) is now offered as both an audio podcast--anywhere that podcasts are  available--and in video format on the Connecting with Coincidence YouTube channel. Please SUBSCRIBE to  our channel to be notified when future episodes are posted! Also available, there are 138 archived episodes of the CCBB podcast  available, HERE.   In this episode, we discuss with professional poker player and author David Hench his views on the significance of synchronicity and  whether the universe is what it appears to be. David was always intrigued by both sports statistics and palindromes, and became a trivia  champion, forever keeping an eye on palindromes in letters or numbers. So imagine his surprise when, at age 50, he ordered his birth  certificate and saw that he had been delivered into this world by a "Dr. Staats," and that, beyond that uncanny coincidence, the certificate was  littered with palindromes. Both the doctor's first name (Bob) and last  name (Staats) were palindromes, as was his time of birth: 6:06 PM.  So David is a statictics (a.k.a.'stats') fanatic, delivered into the world by Dr. Staats (both homonym for 'stats' and a palindrome). An auspicious debut into a life filled with synchronicities.   Our guest David Hench is a lifelong poker player, until recently. He is the author of a poker humor column called "Joker Journal," and he later  compiled the column into a book of poker humor. He's currently a writer of spiritual, inspirational, human interest, sports and humor topics. In his writing now, he is an advocate for the true self of people. Learn more about David Hench at Sojourner-Publications.com.    Our host Dr. Bernard Beitman is the first psychiatrist since Carl Jung to attempt to systematize the study of coincidences. He is Founding  Director of The Coincidence Project. His book, and his Psychology Today blog, are both titled Connecting with Coincidence. He has developed the  first valid and reliable scale to measure coincidence sensitivity, and has written and edited coincidence articles for Psychiatric Annals. He is a visiting professor at the University of Virginia and former chair of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He attended Yale Medical School and completed a psychiatric residency at Stanford. Dr. Beitman has received two national awards for his  psychotherapy training program and is internationally known for his research into the relationship between chest pain and panic disorder. Learn more at https://coincider.com.