Poker and Social Equailty

[OtisTheMarsupial]

[ QUOTE ]
Poker keeps coming up as an analogy for the Market, Capitalism, etc. in these threads. Stop it. Poker is a horrible, horrible example---in the ideal poker world, with no rake, it is a zero sum GAME. Obviously that isn't the case, so poker is a net loss GAME. Lets hope the market isn't.


[/ QUOTE ] (emphasis added)

Well said.

Poker involves money, but it's a GAME, not an economic system.

[lastchance]

A Poker-like economic system would suck, real bad, good post. Poker is a game that has many economic implications, but at the end, it is fixed-sum (average is actually negative considering rake), and the market is not, and that makes all the difference in the world.

[tek]

Communism and Socialism (which is just Communism in a hurry) both involve the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few (which we have in this supposedly free market US). Therefore, poker (both cash games and tournies) are similar since a few make the most.

Discuss.

[The Armchair]

You're right about the zero-sum aspect. OP's comments, though, were in reaction to my statement (above), and I'm honestly unimpressed how quickly people (not you) jump to reprhase the statement in a different and exceptionally incorrect manner.

Then again, this is the politics board of a poker forum, not the opposite.

[zaxx19]

Is the quasi-Oligarchy developing then like the Casino/House raking the entire game with little to no risk of losses as long as they act relatively rationally and with decent risk aversion?

[Kaz The Original]

Ahh rhetoric.

[jaxmike]

please define equality.

[Idaho Ave]

any human is a hyprocrit regardless of political affiliations.

[tek]

More like playing in the game with a cold deck [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img]

[Cyrus]

[ QUOTE ]
Abysmal poverty and an immobile class structure brought on by a failed and flawed economic system explains this quite nicely.

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm sorry but where is the causality?

What you say about the Soviet Union may be true but why have those conditions promoted the Soviets' chess mastery? Were those conditions necessary for chess mastery? (If this is so, then why these conditions, when reproduced elsewhere in the world, did not produce chess masters?)

The question was whether poker is inherently "anti-socialist". I submitted that, before we embark on speculative arguments, we have to explain first how a sport that is far more antagonistic than poker, i.e. chess, thrived under socialist/communist conditions.