If anyone is wondering why I always use tournament poker in my examples, it's for three reasons:

1. That's all that I play. I am not qualified to discuss cash games.

2. Everyone knows what a tournament is, whether it's chess, softball, or NCAA basketball. Talking about poker tournaments and chess tournaments is a good way to compare apples to apples (you pay to enter, and you might or might not go deep enough to win something)

3. A lot of people think of poker as a way to lose your house or your kid's college fund. Yes, that could happened, but it's much less likely in tournament poker. No one is shoving the college fund in the heat of the moment. That is one of the reasons that I chose tournaments. Also, I like the finality, the competition, winning or losing, trying to be the best.

Someone could also lose all of his money day trading, or buying and running an unsuccessful restaurant, or in many other ways.

I guess you could say that "I "take money away from people" if you really want to stretch that meaning, but when I play a $50 chess tournament and knock someone out just before a cashing spot, do I "take his money?"

Finally, I don't like hearing that people are "addicted" to poker because when I ask what that means, the person often says something like, "he plays all the time."

Cellist Yo-Yo Ma has been known to enjoy the life of a famous touring musician--by playing scales in his hotel room for six hours. Does that make him a music addict? I know someone who runs a marathon every month. Would anyone call him an addict?

The way you guys talk about it, then even football is gambling, because you need luck to win a tournament :-) (or even a game)

The only thing a team can do is to get better players so the odds are in their favor.

Are teams paying money to enter the tournament with no guarantee of return but substantial cash prizes up top? If so, then there's a gambling element, yes.

Yes the part of the team who wear the teamshirts and watch every game from the sideline do that :-)
(Footbal betting)

In fact all those footbal fans are actual gambling addicts

And the players also get a substantial cash prize when they win the tournament. But there always sponserd considering the entering fee.

There you go; they don't put up money to enter. A soccer player's net income will not be negative. That's how easy it is to define what is gambling and somehow some people are able to twist it for themselves and create their own little world where poker somehow is not gambling in fear of something that doesn't exist.

For me gambling is playing a game where the outcome is determined by chance without any possible influance from the player. (casino)

Determining if poker is gambling you should make a destinction between short term and long term.

Short-term is can be called gambling.

Long term it can be a game of skill.

So in fact poker is a game of gambling with skill :-)

In roulette, the player can make sure he's never winning any money, for example by placing equal bets on red and black. Lots of other games of chance have components where one player being bad on purpose makes him lose. That doesn't mean those games aren't gambling in general.

ah yes, with "outcome" i dont mean, how much money you loose or win, because you can influence that with how you bet as you state. But the outcome of where you bet on, that what determines the pay-out and the pay-out itself.

So with poker you cannot change the outcome of where you bet on, but you can change/influance the pay-out of your bet.

No they're not the same. Yes they are both gambling. One is beatable, however.

Losing players gamble. I still stand by that statement.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Yeah actually nobody cares what you think about gambling because we actually have a definition which has been quoted many times. So, accept it.

Yeah that is not what gambling is. Nobody cares about what you `think is gambig´. Literally, the definition has been set and whatever you think about it doesn´t mean jack ****.

I feel saying this is important because whatever people think is gambling is actually irrelevant, because what gambling is is actually pretty much defined.

Sorry people in your bubble

I've been thinking about this a lot. My biggest problem with the word "gambler" is that it has a negative connotation, but the problem is deeper than that. It's not about what people think about us, it's about how we are treated.

As long as poker is considered gambling, players are going to get hurt. The best example of this is how we are treated by the IRS. I'll give you one example that isn't talked about very much.

Playing, studying and recordkeeping for poker takes all of my work hours. My only income is from poker. That qualifies me as a self-employed Schedule C business, which means, among other things, that business expenses can be directly subtracted from my taxable income.

But here's the problem. Because poker is considered gambling, poker players are scrutinized more closely than other Schedule C businesses. If I have a second job that takes up more than half of my work hours or provides more than half of my income, the IRS can disallow my Schedule C status and my business deductions are gone.

I don't know any other Schedule C business that is treated that way. My brother could have three Schedule C businesses, make roughly 1/3 of his income from each, and that's fine--because he's not a gambler.

The word "gambler" means that i can't be trusted and I might be asked to prove that it's my job. I am either a Professional Poker Player (the Department of Labor job designation) or I'm not--and the IRS gets to decide.

If someone who owned a landscaping business wanted to buy a restaurant, it wouldn't matter which business makes the most money. Buying the restaurant would certainly not be considered gambling, even though 60% of restaurants fail in the first year, 80% within five years.

As long as the IRS continues to think about "gamblers" in that way and treat us that way, I will insist that the word does not apply to me or to my profession.

http://www.businessinsider.com/why-r...o-often-2014-2

It's fair to dislike the negative connotation poker players have as "gamblers," but ultimately IRS designations (and even negative social perceptions) aren't sufficient to just ignore the definition of words.

Poker is different from (most) other forms of gambling in that skill can be used to consistently profit, but this doesn't mean it's not gambling.

You still don't get it, do you?

The definition of gambling is 'risking something of value on an outcome which is not 100% certain'.

When you get AA all in preflop vs KJ, you are gambling. You are risking a valuable item (money) on an outcome which isn't 100% certain. Sure, you are a massive favourite to win. But it is still gambling.

When you shove 72 preflop and get called by AA, you are also gambling. You are a massive underdog, but the AA is not certain to win.

You can gamble with an edge (eg. playing poker against a worse opponent) or gamble without an edge (eg. slots, roulette, playing poker against a better opponent). But the simple fact remains: they are both gambling.


You can 'stand by your statement' all you want. You are wrong. The definitions are very clear.

We could have 100% the same discussion in a loan shark forum.

As long as you are aware that you are lying to yourself.

Wow, now we aren't just gamblers who need to be regulated and might be lying about our profession. We're being compared to loan sharks.

If we're going to twist things in that way, how about this?

Everyone is a gambler, because everyone, from time to time, makes a bet that risks something something of value. When you drive your kids to school you're risking the thing that is most valuable to you--your children. We all know that a lot of people die in auto accidents every year You're making a bet that you and your kids won't die today, which clearly makes you a gambler.

Some would say that I'm stretching the meaning of "something of value" too far, so let's talk money.

John decides that he wants to be a doctor and he's willing to take out 100K in student loans to make that happen. Gambling or not?

When I tell a fellow nerd (there are a lot of engineers in my church) that my job is playing poker tournaments, they find in interesting and usually want to know more. If I told someone in my church that I make my living as a gambler, the reaction would be different.

So the magical being does have something to do with it after all.

Does John go to a casino to take out this loan to be a doctor?

I don't want to hate on poker. I love the game and my life would be totally different today if I hadn't started playing seriously 10 years ago.

But I doubt anyone would argue that the player pool wouldn't look totally different if we took the gamble aka money out of it. OP said tennis or golf? To have a competition like that, just remove price pools from poker tournaments and play for ranking points instead. Game could be hosted outside of casinos and players just pay for dealers/facilities/organization like they do in other sports. If that creates a big enough player pool, sponsors will come. But I am not conviced that would happen..

A student takes out a loan to become a doctor and help people. Every pro poker player that thinks he's helping society by providing his services, lies to himself. At least not beyond the extent that strippers do. The world wouldn't be a worse place without pro poker players. Obviously, not all recreational players have a gambling problem, but when you walk through a tournament area, you see guys at every single table that would be far better off spending their money on something else. Lots of those players wouldn't be there without the chance to win money and at least a decent number of people wouldn't enter a tournament if they would really understand how -EV it is for them.

Do you really think Jesus would say "good job man, take those suckers for their money!"? Or do you think he would advocate for you to tell them to spend their money on better things or at least to teach them how to improve their game to level the playing field?

Oh, cmon man. A world without strippers......Oh, the horror...the horror.

I purposefully didn't include hookers, because a significantly higher number of customers leave them satisfied compared to poker tournament.

With strippers, most customers get a pretty good tease and then go home empty handed and have to finish off at home. So not too different from most poker players

Are we really asking if poker is a gambling game? Despite our skill levels and experience, and despite those factors in our opponents, are we still unsure if we are gambling when we play a hand of poker? A gamble is making a descision based on our PERCEIVED odds of it being positive or negative result for us. Does anyone really think that ALL poker descisions are not based on perceived odds? What is this discussion about? Of course poker is a form of gambling.

What people think is gambling would only be irrelevant if authors of dictonaries were infallable gods. There is a whole subset of problems in philosophy concerning what words mean and how they get their meaning.

Usually when you look closer there is no easy way to understand why certain activites get one label, but other very similar activities do not. Why is playing poker called gambling, but opening a resturant called investing?

Because of the insane mind gymnastics you can see in this thread. But other than that I think there is a pretty good reason why we don't generally refer to starting businesses as gambling; there is no element built in to increase the variance in it.

With poker, we use cards to deliberately create a way for everyone to be able to win in the short term. In all ins we could run the whole deck as a default or online you could pay out players according to EV, yet we don't. For the obvious reason that if we decrease the variance too much fish aren't able to win once in a while and the game dies. If you deliberately add a mechanism that allows for people to gamble then what are we going to call it. No business owner will be happy to flip his monthly revenue on a 55% just for the fun of it. They won't make the price of a hamburger depend on the suit of the card that the customer draws. They won't roll a dice to decide who to hire so that you get a nice mix between really good and really bad employees.

This is the same for most sports. While sometimes you can miss the goal due to one tiny piece of grass or the wind catches the ball, there are no obstacles put in place to increase the variance. We aren't putting up massive leaf blowers at the hole at golf. We aren't randomly moving the basket so that even the simplest layup could fail.

When the intention of the game is to make it rely on the element of chance, you cannot not call it gambling. On the other hand while some things depend on some kind of luck those elements are not purposefully put in place. So strictly speaking you could call opening a business a gamble and many people actually would call it that, but I think you can defend not calling it that because of the intention. Poker and other sports are not even close to "similar activities".