Stop denying that poker is gambling

[memphis57]

[ QUOTE ]

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.


[/ QUOTE ]

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.

[cardcounter0]

poker = gambling
gambling <> bad

carry on.

[memphis57]

[ QUOTE ]
poker = gambling
gambling <> bad

[/ QUOTE ]

Exactly.

BTW, the reason I thought this worthy of yet another post is the discussions elsewhere about legalization. I think all the folks saying "poker isn't gambling" hurt our chances of getting it legalized, because all the puritans have to do is convince themselves that poker IS gambling and then they feel like they've defeated all our arguments. In fact, we should admit that poker is gambling and then go on to show how this doesn't make poker a bad thing.

[cardcounter0]

Back in history:

Columbus getting in a ship and sailing west = gambling.
Gettng together and writing a constituion and thumbing your nose at old King George = gambling.
Heading out west in a covered wagon = gambling.

In today's world:

Buying stock in IBM = gambling.
Opening up a business = gambling.
Buying a house, expecting to sell for more in a few years = gambling.

If it wasn't for people willing to take a gamble, we would all still be living in caves, trying to figure out how to make fire.

[Rode_Dog]

Poker is gambing, no question. It is, however, substantially different from slots or classic table games. Those games are setup with the house favored. If I play perfectly, I will still lose money over time. That's why I don't play those games.

Poker, on the other hand, pits me against other players. Given enough hands, we all get the same cards, so my skill, or lack thereof, will determine my winnings or losses.

In Ohio, poker is classified as a "game of chance" rather than a "game of skill". This, IMO, is wrong. Slots are a game of chance, not poker.

[ACPlayer]

Poker is a gambling activity.

Skilled poker players can have an edge over other players and if the edge is large enough to beat the game they can come out ahead.

There is however, one aspect of this that is swept under the rug by most poker promoters as a game of skill. THis is that for many poker players this is gambling and for many it is a problme gambling (just like problem BJ players etc). There are recently widowed, divorced, fired, people who all come to play to escape the pain they feel at home or from being alone.

Playing poker is also addictive. For example last year I took the year off and went off to travel through Asia. On my return the poker players I knew from before in AC and FW the first question they asked was "But did you not miss poker". Excuse me, this is not quite lick asking did you not miss working the assly line building cars - or whatever job you guys do. I never miss playing cards, mostly because for me this is a job, I am good at it but after 5 years, this is mostly a boring job -- listening to stories of one outers, sitting next to people I dont particularly like, being nice to them (I am uniformly nice to all my customers, even the sociopaths).

So, if you are a good player, you can call what you do intelligent investing rather than gambling. But be sure you are not kidding yourself.

[Rode_Dog]

You speak to the motivations for playing. Some folks will be problem gamblers. If not poker, then BJ, slots, lottery, whaterver. It's not the game, it's the player.

I play because I love the game. I love the competition. I want to out-play my opponents and the money is the measure of my success.

It sounds like you are playing to earn money. Nothing wrong with that, especially if you can make a substantial amount of cash. If I were bored with it, I would probably go do someting else.

[ACPlayer]

Oh, I use the money to finance my interests-- travel, diving, being the main ones.

I do see a lot of people, both winners and losers who's life revolve around the game and who measure success by the money they make at it. They live for the next turn of the cards.

Of course pathological cases will gravitate to this and other gambling activities. It is a fine line between poker as a profession, as an obsession, and a deep dark pit of financial disaster.

I have been blessed in that I have had a long and very rewarding career (in software and technology and management) and I am very glad that I spent the 20 plus years in productive and useful work that took me around the world.

If a person is bright enough to survive and prosper as a poker player he/she can likely make very good money in a real meaningful career.

[mustmuck]

I'm guessing this one has come up many times before, but I'm not going to look.

I'd imagine poker fits most definitions of gambling. However, as noted, I wouldn't put poker in the same gambling group as slot machines, roulette etc, where the odds are never in your favour.

Also as noted, you could try to fit a lot of other activities that aren't generally considered gambling into a gambling defintion.

I really couldn't care less though. Poker is poker.

[memphis57]

Several good points made on the nature of poker and poker players, but my real point here (which I admit I didn't make too well - and I also admit I don't own this thread, people are free to comment on what they want to comment on) is that I think all the people who argue poker isn't gambling hurt our chances for getting online poker explicitly legalized. Because the fact is that the game of poker can be used as a means of negative-expectation gambling, that some (many) people use it as such, and that we who make money off poker rely on them using it that way. For every shark there have to be many, many fish. So, in the legalization debate, we need to stay away from this talk of poker as a game of skill, and focus on the right of people to use their entertainment dollars as they choose.

Is it better that a thrill seeker spends $100 on dvds of thrill movies or on carnival rides or on fast cars, than on gambling? Government should be indifferent - it's all entertainment money. And, given that there is so much legalized gambling (a casino within two hours drive of x% of the population), is it better that thrill seekers blow $1000 on one night of slots or $100/night on 10 nights of online poker? Again, government should be indifferent.

The crux of the issue, probably, is tax revenue. To get online poker legalized, there will have to be a way that the US government makes money off it (beyond income tax revenue, which they are entitled to anyway). I'm not sure how to do that.