Stop denying that poker is gambling

[memphis57]

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Poker is NOT gambling. Skill, skill, blah, blah, blah, here's my carefully selected definition I got after looking 50 places, here's why poker as played by a minority of players like me doesn't fit that definition, blah, blah, skill, skill, blah.


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Stop denying that poker is gambling. This does no good for legalization efforts. It might help reconcile friends/family to your being a gambler, but only by lying to them. And if you believe this yourself, you're probably headed for a bust and bankruptcy one day.

Let's look at these reasons one by one.

Legalization - Yes, poker can be a game of skill, but it can also be a game of luck, depending on how you play it. Would it do us any good if poker were legalized, but only for those who earn a poker license by going to Sklansky school for 2 years? Would we make any money against that caliber of player? We need online poker to be legalized for the fish as well as for the sharks.

Friends and family - Advantage poker, as practiced by some 2+2ers, is gambling with a positive expectation, but it is still gambling. With proper skills, table selection and bankroll management, positive expectation gambling can be made to be profitable most of the time, but the amount of those profits will fluctuate wildly with luck and occasionally you can even lose money. (In contrast to casinos, where hundreds of millions of repetitions cause the law-of-large-numbers to guarantee a profit on a positive expectation game, no individual gambler can achieve enough repetitions to be absolutely certain of a profit.)

Yourself - You will have a better shot at never going bust if you think of poker as gambling and are always worried about losing your bankroll. If you buy into the notion that poker is a guaranteed income stream, you can get overconfident and go bust in two ways. First, required bankrolls are calculated using a confidence interval, usually of 1-5%. If you play enough, you will eventually have a downswing in the 95th or 99th percentile, and that can bust you. Second, the size of your positive expectation is dependent upon how much better you are than the opposition. One day (hopefully no time soon), we will likely see a prolonged upswing in the quality of opponents we play against, and you may not notice the change until its too late and you've busted.

That is all.