Quote:
Originally Posted by BSumner
Bored and found this thread.
Wanted to share, I met this woman online, we move to texting, at some point I explain that in my free time/hobbies I play poker and wrote a book on the math and psychology of poker to help myself learn and improve (I'm a math/psych nerd, cant lie)
I tell her my goal is to win enough every 6 months to pay my property taxes with other people's money. I have successfully done this for the last 8 years in a row. I play every other weekend and on some days off from work.
She insists that my "gambling" is a "waste of money"
So here's what probably happened. There are a lot of delusional people who gamble (like, non-poker gambling) that think they have some sort of system, and lie (to themselves and others) about being a winning player. Most people have no idea that poker is completely different than a casino game type of gambling like blackjack or craps, they think it's all the same thing. So when you told her you played poker and you were good at it and you won, she was looking at you like you'd look at someone who said they had a roulette system - ie a delusional gambler who is either lying about making money or maybe they just ran lucky in the short term but their degen tendencies will overtake it.
You get better results if you explain how poker differs from "gambling" first - that it's not a fixed-odd game that you play against the house, but rather a game you play against other players where the casino makes money by taking a cut for running the game, not by betting against you. So, unlike all the other types of gambling where you can only make losing bets, you can win at poker by being better than the other players. You can emphasize that it's closer to chess with a random element than something like blackjack.