Poker is not good for you

So, Sklansky and Schoonmacker have a 6,000 word article on 2+2 about how poker is good for you, and should therefore be considered a socially acceptable game and treated differently, presumably under the UIGEA.

It's complete nonsense.

For one thing, many of their "life lessons" learned from poker, could just as easily be learned from golf, or tennis, or wakeboarding, or even wandering the streets aimlessly and begging for money. Poker teaches good decision making. Poker teaches how to analyze risk-reward situations. Pap. Piffle. Blarg.

So, fine, it's glib. Ok. That doesn't necessarily make it wrong, does it? Well, maybe.

Take this:

Poker teaches you to think of risks and rewards before acting. If it taught nothing else, poker would prevent some young people from making terrible mistakes. More generally, most of poker's lessons will help young people to make critically important decisions.

This is true for some people. Primarily, those people are winning poker players. Not everyone is a winning poker player. Very few are actual winning poker players. This is true for a couple reasons. Rake for one. Another is that very few people who are likely to play a gambling game have the impulse control necessary to have or learn the discipline needed to think before acting.

So really, what the article is arguing is that being a winning poker player is good for you. That's kind of pointless. Being a good cardcounter at blackjack might be good for you too, but no one is going to argue that it legitimizes teaching junior high kids how to count cards.

What this really gets at is the notion, that many people have, that since poker is a beatable game, it's different than gambling. Gambling is something suckers do. You don't have an hourly rate if you're gambling, just a negative expectation.

Blackjack is gambling. Poker is a game of skill.

Both of those statements are true, but they're not talking about the same thing.

Blackjack is a game that by rule prevents a player from gaining a positive expectation on any given hand. The only limitations on a player's expectation in a poker game are the rake and the other players.

In blackjack, you play, and ultimately lose to, the rules of the game. Unless you can count cards, you can't maintain a longterm +EV.

In poker, you play, and ultimately have either a positive or negative expectation based on the structure of the game and the other players. It's very likely that while I'm a winner at 1/2, I would be a longterm loser at 5/10.

So what Sklansky is really arguing here is that by becoming winning players, people will benefit, not just fromt he money, but from the knowledge gained along the way.

The trouble with that is that if everyone really did try to become winning players, the vast majority of them would still be losers. It's the law of the jungle. So arguing that through "skill" one can benefit automatically is just false. Winning players rely on people being worse than them. It's not a fixed level. At $25NL you may only need skills A and B to win. If everyone playing $25NL actually tried to get better, then eventually, you might need skills A, B, C and D to win, and even that might not be a guarantee.

What is absolutely certain is that even if everyone played a "perfect" TAG game of 20/18/3.5, with an ATSB of 33%, a wtsd of 24, and a W@SD of 51, not everyone would win. Someone would adjust. Someone would find cracks. Someone would run good. The rake would eat away at all of them.

And most would end up losers.

Poker is built on the corpses of losers. Putting on this mock-happy face of "Hey, look, poker teaches you all this good stuff too. It's fun and wholesome!" is just crap. It deludes those who think Sklansky is God and even worse, it all but concedes that "gambling" is bad and should be confined only to those dens of iniquity (Gary, IN) where even a gambling establishment might not pull down the public morals.

That's conceding their point. That's telling Joe McCarthy that "yes, we need to root out the Commies in Hollywood, but really sir, I'm not one. Please don't hurt me."

Fuck that.

People like to gamble. They bet on dogs, horses, little bouncing balls, Bingo, cards, slots, whatever. They don't care what, as long as they get a fix. We should spend less time telling people how awful they are for being normal. That's my answer to the UIGEA. Shut the fuck up you freaks. Crawl back into whatever snake-handling pit you came from. and leave us adults alone. We're the normal ones. You bible-thumping jackasses are the freaks.

If only I were in Congress.