You nailed it there. That's another issue I have with these guys arguing for "protecting" the degen. You can lie to us and say that it's cause you want to help them and not cause you want to feel good about yourself. Just remember to not lie to yourself.

You left out the most important thing about soft-playing - you are treating one player different than another. If you want to go easy on everyone, I would think you were pretty stupid, but I wouldn't call it collusive. It's the soft-playing some players while playing your best against others which is wrong.

How would you feel if you were travelling and got in a game where you knew no one but everyone else seemed to know each other and went easy on each other but played very tough against you? Would you find that to be a fair game?

This is a great way to be in life. It's a very bad way to be in competitive games.

Do you think it would be a good idea, say, for a college basketball player in the final 4 to decide he wants to be nice to the other team who has never won a championship before, so he decides to throw the game? You don't think maybe that would be unfair to his teammates?

In a live setting I can see some reputational risks involved with being known as the guy who preys on vulnerable people to turn a profit. Not really sure what is the GTO, tend to think fully leaving a table with a known gambling addict is better than staying and soft playing, or even only playing theory vs him. Let's say I'm waiting for the soft private nosebleeds game I got invited to start, by playing 5/10 in a table with such person. Being known as an ******* in such environment will probably work against my best interests, even if this reputation would be unfair if we think logically.

just take their money and buy them a sandwich with their own money or something, better than if you’d left and they punted it to someone else

Arguments with false premises are faulty arguments.

Careful or that self-righteous clown might block you too.

Are you actually suggesting that poker isn't a game of chance?

I have nothing but contempt for the people who insist that poker isn't a gambling game but is a skill game. Yes, there is a powerful skill element, but poker is fundamentally and inescapably a gambling game, and you are deluding yourself if you think otherwise.

One of the core skills of poker-the-skill-game is gambling effectively.

Also, you are wrong to say that there is nothing a player can do to win over the long term in casino games. Smart, informed players can exploit various advantage plays, ranging from edges arising from player's club promotions to scouring the casino floor for slot machines left in states where play is temporarily +EV.

Good luck with that.

* * *

Is predation inherently unethical?

To follow this question up, is an obligate carnivore such as a lion or cheetah living in the Serengeti unethical by their very nature? Does this make them inherently evil, in a way that a zebra or impala living in the Serengeti is not?

Yeah cause someone like Garrett Adelstein got to where he is today by not being ruthless and soft playing 5/10 guys to get invited to the big private games/live streams.

If they felt Garrett was a good fit for the game, who am I to say anything against him.

Pro poker offers a lot of benefits to the professional players. There are a lot of pros who don't fit in to the regular 9-to-5 jobs that society has to offer, and poker keeps them employed. Also I am sure plenty of people on the spectrum play for a living, like me. The game gives these disabled people fulfillment and a productive way to pass their time and earn a living. A lot of these people would otherwise be in a hospital or worse. If the players are smart enough and philanthropic enough, eventually when they become wealthy they may use their wealth to do a lot of good, which also benefits society. Whether these benefits justify the harm to the problem gamblers is up for debate though. (Some might argue these types are inherently bad with money and the pros will use it better.)

I'm not sure citing carnivores as an example is that helpful. Sure, animals have the capacity to act ethically (e.g. dogs, apes, mice) but not to same extent as humans. Perhaps show how lions act ethically in one respect (e.g. cooperate with one another) and then still act in a predatory way. Does this present an ethical dilemma for that species?

The behaviour of wolves might be more interesting due to their level of social awareness.

For humans I would say that predation is inherently unethical. This is because we know how such behaviour can cause significant harm to others and society as a whole. We also know there are effective alternatives to predation in respect of sourcing food and resources.

Ethics, and general correct behavior, is the GTO for society to work and progress to be made in its optimal pace. You can't have progress, or, at best, it will be very slow, if people have to be 100% of the time stressed out over others trying to scam them, rob them, kill them. Just look at how the economy of countries that don't have their **** together goes.

Religion, moral codes, peer pressure, mind hacks, can be viewed just as that: hacks, and in some cases, heuristics, so that the behavior that works for the greater good comes automatically to you.

People freely exchanging money for goods or services they desire is healthy economic activity.

Perhaps something like predatory lending, payday loans or pawn shops which are on the fringes of true capitalism but rely on the delusion of their customers would be a reasonable comparison but not ordinary commerce.

OP It depends. People can provide justifications for you but the question is in fact an ethical one with no set answer; it is up to each to answer for themselves. But bum hunting 2/5 and 5/10 or whatever is a way of life that can ultimately rot your own soul. Be glad you have a conscience and start thinking about what skills you have or could develop to function in the broader economy.

You may find that there is still a place for recreational pokerÂ… it can possibly be fun and profitableÂ… that too is an individual matter.

What are some examples? Of both businesses and careers that are highly ethical?

I think we are in late stage capitalism and we’re stuck w a few large corporations (winners) that often don’t even have to have their customers best interest bc of the monopoly created.

Even the most ethical companies get bought out by the big conglomerates.

Ah the old comparing humans to lions…

We’re not lions we have ability to reason and rationalize and this whole thing called free will.

Life is much simpler when we let go of notions of absolute right and wrong.

Survival trumps everything. Humans are apex predators. If we walk around with an illusion that people will not doing everything possible to get an edge, we choose an alternative to reality.

Some years ago at a security conference, someone demonstrated that a deck of cards can be marked with a bar code which could read with an infrared reader hidden in a phone or a key fob. We saw indirect evidence of that with the play of Mike Postle. Now we know that card shufflers can be rigged in a similar fashion.

If you sit down and play poker in 2024, you should expect that the game is rigged and be pleasantly surprised if it isn't.

I've seen too much play that makes no sense at showdown in the absence of advance knowledge of the outcome. Even in low limit games. Cheating seems rampant and card room owners don't have a financial incentive to invest in stopping it. Indeed, some of them can potentially have an incentive to not stop it.

An enlightened community that prioritized a fair game might highlight the card rooms which have taken the most proactive measures to prevent cheating. We might for example, scan for and ban all live electronic devices such as cell phones at a table.

Even in a game with no cheating, a smart poker player is a ruthless predator who seeks out inferior competition to gain an edge. Poker is a game of predator and prey.

Yep, and everyone at the poker table is an adult who chose to be there and put his money at risk.

Einstein disagreed with the notion of free will and so do lots of quantum physicists.

After 3B years of evolution, our mammalian ancestors that produced both humans and lions squeezed through the last mass extinction 65M years ago as rat sized critters.

We have far more in common with lions than you may wish to believe.

Humans are obviously more sophisticated creatures. But I'd give lions the edge in collective intelligence. Lions aren't the cause of the current flirtation with a sixth mass extinction. They don't lie to each other or live in fear of each other or create fairy tales for each other about an afterlife in order to control each other during the present life. Lion's don't have the capacity to be gullible.

Humans are social pack animals just like lions. 95% of the population orbits around a behavioral code of mimicry. We do what we need to do in order to fit safely inside the confines of a protective pack. The other 5% is somewhere "on the spectrum". Our ability to reason and rationalize in ways which are outside the norms of our survival pack is vastly overstated.

Yeah but my cat is an absolute ****

Every time you play a hand it's raked and the government, which I call the legalised mafia, tax the rake, which pays the doctors, teachers and nurses.

How does one tell the difference between an addict and someone who is playing below their means and has money to burn. On last fridays hcl some Georgia the animal steel look a like punted of stack after stack after stack. Vertucci was in chat and said he was a land developer. So does he have a problem or is he a rich dude having fun

Exactly.

Exactly. Anyone pretending they are able to tell the difference is a fool.

Guys there's only so much Netflix, listening to the the Wife and jacking off into a tissue a man can take.

Poker is a great game. No need to overthink it.