I agree. At the same time I have met many wonderful people through live Poker that are now part of my life and who I wouldn't want to miss. Some of my best friends nowadays. So, Poker can do a lot for your own life (money, social net) but Poker events can also contribute to society: Organizing Poker tournaments, private rounds etc. is a lot of fun and everybody involved does it also for the love of being social/part of a (Poker) society setting. Not just purely for the money. That's what I love about (live) Poker and MTT tournaments, especially.
Online Poker not as much social as live but we are all here and found each other on 2+2 and other forums and interact (a)socially, which is great, too!

Kumbaya

One thing I would say is that poker is the greatest psychological game on earth.

Although psychology exists in pretty much everything, other games, sports etc,
that I'm aware, its more important in poker than any other game there is.

And not just the psychology of other people, but your own psychology.
How do you deal with big losses, playing huge stakes etc. Like most sports
are probably 95%+ skill, with a small psychological element. Not sure
of this number in poker, but its vastly different.

Anyone interested in studying psychology, the human condition, would
probably be well served to follow poker players. Sadly, I do think poker
illustrates alot of bad qualities humans have.

Does this count as a societal benefit?

11 October 1994

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, 1994, jointly to

Professor John C. Harsanyi, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA,
Dr. John F. Nash, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA,
Professor Dr. Reinhard Selten, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, Bonn, Germany,

for their pioneering analysis of equilibria in the theory of non-cooperative games.

[including poker]

more at
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/ec...press-release/

Poker is nothing without the gambling. Chess is a game of skill, no luck or gambling involved.

Spot on

Playing poker recreationally is fine. It’s being a “professional” that clearly isn’t . So many posters in self serving denial of the obvious

You realize that's the whole goal of running a business? To provide a service/product and charge the maximum amount of money for it (pain)? Do you think a hospital charging 30k to deliver a baby via c-section is not pain inflicting? At least in poker the rules are defined - in business there's predatory behavior going on that the consumer has no clue about, and people are being fleeced daily. Credit cards charging 25% interest to people struggling to pay, reverse home equity loans getting older folks to light their savings on fire, etc. Poker is child's play compared to the real world - don't be naive.

For the vast majority of products and services in society, pricing is fair due to competition, and/or there are more affordable price options available. E.g, for food and clothing you can buy cheaper non branded versions of the product, and in food you can cook your own meals cheaply and in clothing you can spend long periods of opting out of buying new clothes.

I agree with you there are some exploitative industries, the medical industry in the USA, and the veterinary practices in the UK being two examples. You could also argue that many governments exploit citizens in a predatory way by introducing stealth taxes that businesses then pass on to the consumer.

But the key difference between the examples above and the behaviour of a predatory professional poker player is that the examples above universally hurt everybody, whereas a pro poker player is going out of their way to deliberately hurt a select few. In other words, we can't all prevent the medical industry in the USA exploiting and hurting all of us, but a pro poker player could if they wish decide to choose another profession where he/she is not deliberately hurting people.

All of this doesn't make the non poker hurting of people things right or okay. On the contrary, they are all terrible. The US medical care system is shocking and needs improving, with the goal being free or very heavily subsidised medical care. The charges that veterinary practices in the UK have are extortionate, so this needs regulating.

Regarding high interest rates on credit cards and loans, that is purely a function of the relative risk of the borrower defaulting on an unsecured loan. Someone borrowing at 25% is a way higher risk than someone borrowing at 5%, so that is a non argument by you in relation to poker. Yes there are some uber-exploitative lenders charging triple digit lending rates, but those have been regulated against in the UK. Perhaps they haven't yet in the US. If not, they should be.

Again, with equity release loans for older people, here in the UK there are very strict regulations, including the broker having to sit down for an hour or more, carefully explaining all factors, good and bad, to the potential borrowers.

I'm going to add that being a professional poker player and setting out to prey on and exploit weaker opponents, opponents on tilt, or who are drunk, have underlying life problems, or who are gambling addicts, is even worse than being a casino.

The reason is that a casino operates with a reasonably high level of transparency. When you play roulette on a 37 number wheel and the pay out for a single number is 35/1 the casino's edge is transparent and obvious. Games like blackjack and baccarat only require a small amount of googling to find out the house edge. Slots are the exception and should be banned worldwide IMO, because they are deviously designed and programmed to hook players into waiting and waiting for the feature to hit, which is very often the only way the player can get out of a hole, and then often the amount paid out from the feature is not enough to achieve this for the player, so the machine can rinse and repeat.

In the old days of purely mechanical slots (a.k.a. "fruit machines"), which I am old enough to remember and indeed played, the machine although having a ~5% to ~10% edge could and sometimes did run bad. Now it is impossible for a machine to run bad, unless it has first gone through a long period of destroying player after player, so can afford a following short period of deliberate run bad.

Slots aside, a predatory professional poker player is worse ethically than a casino is, because when a weak player plays against the roulette wheel they are knowingly giving up a specific and static edge, whereas when they play a pro poker player they are giving up a known edge in juice for MTTs, or a near known edge in cash game rake, but they are also giving up an additional unknown amount of edge against a pro in the game, one which can be and often is very high. The edge given up by a weak player in a live MTT is way less than in a live cash game. This is one reason, not the only reason, why live MTTs are by far the most ethical version of poker, especially if they are freezeouts, or a maximum of one rebuy.

The edge given up is less for many reasons: juice is paid once only, so not multiple pots raked in a session as in cash, the weak player will generally encounter a higher percentage of other weak players during an MTT than they would stuck at one cash table that often has 1/2 to 2/3rds of the line up as regs or strong regs. A weak player entering a live MTT which is slow and could take hours to complete, is much less likely to be doing so to blow off steam because they have had a bad day at their work or an argument with a family member or partner, or because they are chasing gambling losses they just had at a lower buy in cash game or on table games or sports betting.

In terms of predatory, exploitative, bankroll bullying or any other psychological strategy that a predatory pro player can inflict/deploy against a weak player, these are also greatly restricted / much more difficult to do, to a weak player in a live MTT than in live cash.

Online poker is even more unethical when played in a predatory way by a pro player against weak players, compared to live, because there are far more tools online, some within the rules, some against the rules, that a pro player can use. Even online MTTs are often not "fair" for a weak or rec player, when you consider that it is happening progressively more and more that when they occasionally get very deep in a large field comp that some of their hitherto genuine opponents, who may well be pros, but not top pros, are then ghosted by a top pro, thus blatantly stealing big chunks of EV from the weak player / rec.

Online poker should be banned completely IMO, live cash games should probably enforce stop losses on all players per session (pre agreed with the player before they sit down, so at a time that the player is much more sound of mind, i.e. not on tilt), and we should massively encourage more live MTTs, and make them more exciting and more mainstream, because live MTTs are a pure form of poker and by some distance the most ethical version of poker.

Some fair points but at the end of the day people "choose" to play poker - if they are drunk,gambling addicts,etc that's a poor life decision but still a choice they make. What I find much worse is people who need a surgery and are fleeced financially, the old couple who are in desperate need of money and get swindled with some predatory reverse mortgage, and the fact that in the US we are required to have health insurance yet the rates for a family of 4 are close to a mortgage payment. This might apply more so in the US than other parts of the world, but everything about the world is predatory and about money. You're either the hunter or the hunted - I find poker to be the tame version of this .

That's an excellent point, which I hadn't recognised or thought about properly until you mentioned it, that one's judgement of what is or isn't ethical is often automatically influenced by the overall ethical behaviour of the society that one lives in and of the government which governs it, and that this can set a benchmark of sorts for one's own views on the subject.

I see this thread is still a thing. Well, let me add another comment. This morning on the website Counterpunch there was an article about how Google stock jumped 5% after laying off 12000 employees. I have a bit of Google stock, so I made money at the expense of 12000 people who are now without jobs. Not a lot of money, but money nonetheless. Yesterday I had a bad day at the poker table. In fact, I'm on a bit of a bad run in general. Thus, somebody made money at my expense. To quote the movie "Unforgiven': "We all have it coming, kid." It's all a questions of degree, not kind.

Not everything is predatory at all. Self serving bullshit.

I have to say I do feel better about playing tournaments than I do cash games for ethical reasons. Tournaments feel more like a legit game whereas cash games feel more predatory. No judgment on people who play professionally though. It's just a feeling I have when I play and I do play both.

in both games there are winners and losers, one is not more or less ethical than the other

Having both winners and losers doesn't mean they are both equally ethical in nature. There are more components to a game than winning and losing.

its just a predatory in general though, just less noticeable from a recs point of view because you cant choose the table you sit at

Poker is predatory? Capitalism is predatory in general. But is a necessary evil.

It seems as though some lessons of poker are somehow proliferated from poker into the wider culture. They might sustain various degrees of distortion and misuse along the way, but I have seemed to observe poker as one way that people at large, in and outside of poker, are informed about risk, game theory, money management, addiction, edge, etc. Even the basic concept of making the correct decision and it losing, of the fallacy of being too rigidly results driven, seems to have leaked into the mainstream through poker. You can see this through pop culture or socially.

I'm not saying poker is a net good, but for many students of the game it does provide a lot in terms of developing a probabilistic view of analyzing situations which can be applied widely outside of poker.

Poker might have also done something for empowering people to live outside of the labor market. At first it was only the bold and adventurous willing to take the plunge into professional poker. Then little by little the weak nerdlings took their first tentative steps towards some form of financial independence once they saw others do it first. The visible proliferation of the "professional poker player" has probably pushed against some conceptual boundaries re how to make a living. I don't know if there has ever been a professional class quite like it before, and afterwards we've seen a wide proliferation of solo, internet based careers.

Excellent post.

The understanding and advancement of game theory is not in conflict with poker as a gambling (uncooperative) game.

That is true, but what NumbNutLow said is also true, and provable by the fact that no one is going to rail a series of hands at 5c/10c, but they would rail an identical sequence of hands
being played at $100/$200.

Linked to this point, is that many players who want more action (a.k.a. more gambling) are abandoning NLHE and switching to PLO. Take this a step further and more and more people are straddling in PLO, and a stage further still is that many PLO4 games are now turning into PLO5 and PLO6.

Poker compared to chess is very simplistic. I, or anybody who has a good/decent natural aptitude, if they really, really wanted to and tried their absolute hardest, could get into the upper echelons of poker. But only a miniscule amount of people in the population could achieve the same high level in chess, because it is way, way more complex than poker and impossible to master without an innate super high aptitude.

Without the gambling and money element poker would be close to nothing, almost a non entity, or at best would only have a very niche following, like Bridge.

We could say the same about horse racing. Who would watch a group of predominantly brown coloured, similar looking horses, being ridden around a track if their wasn't money riding on it! (pun fully intended).

Many people's false, in my opinion, perception of poker being some mind blowing game that if you excel at it makes you some kind of genius, is due to two main factors in my opinion:

1. There are a lot of weak players, the gambling masses also playing it, so if you are not one of those people and apply yourself, it might make you look and feel like a genius, but this is only in comparison to the opposition. You are not a genius.

2. There are millions of people of a very high aptitude that have never tried playing poker or have no desire to do so. If only a fraction of this group played, it would shunt the vast majority of current good players down the success rankings.

Statement 2. does not equally apply to many other sports or games. E.g. in the national sports of most countries, Rugby Union: Wales and New Zealand, American Football, Baseball, Basketball and Ice Hockey: USA and Canada, Cricket, Field Hockey, Kabaddi: India: Soccer, Beach Volleyball: Brazil: Soccer and Cricket: UK, most people as youngsters have played one or more of their national sport from a young age, so the people who end up at the top when they mature into young adults/adults are a true representation of how good you need to be, to be at the top, and those at the top can rightfully therefore consider themselves to be at genius level in their sport.

Obviously there are some sports, rowing is a good example, where only a small percentage of the population try it. Here in the UK it is mainly university educated people and/or middle class people that row. It is mainly a brute strength and fitness sport, so I dare say that if a campaign was launched to get the rough, tough (and genetically much stronger) young people into rowing that are from poorer economic backgrounds, that they would crush and embarrass the mainly posh boys and girls that are currently the best rowers.

So this is a comparison to actively encouraging/recruiting the greatest minds into poker. They would make a lot of current "ballers" and "Gs" just look average or below average.

Does parting a fool and his money carry a net social benefit, by concentrating pools of investment capital in "wiser" hands ?

Yes and no.

Yes because wiser hands will likely be more productive with the money, e.g. build a housing development with the money, or start a new business with the money, either/both of which improve society's infrastructure and creates new jobs.

But also maybe no, or sometimes no, because the wiser hands, specifically those that have gained their wealth entirely through poker are less likely than the average person in my opinion, to be of a socially responsible mind.

The value in poker in that some people enjoy it, can be entertained by it, or find meaning by learning and getting good at it. That's all it needs to be

A lot of posts in this thread say things like "x 'contributes more to society, therefore poker isn't good for anything", which is nothing more than boomer level galaxy brain nonsense.

Not everything has to be the most important thing in the world to be good for something, and comparing it to anything is a waste of time and gets us nowhere.

Seems like an appealing reason, until you realize how much some pros spend on expensive items and other frivolous material possessions. But I agree that,
on average, winning players will probably spend and invest better than the losing ones.