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I find interesting that no one (yet) in OP or in the comments has talked about my main complaint about playing Poker as a living: it's a zero sum game where you

by Tarsul 3y ago

I find interesting that no one (yet) in OP or in the comments has talked about my main complaint about playing Poker as a living: it's a zero sum game where you basically only take money from other people. It's not productive. For me, that in itself is as depressing as the grind. But it appears most players don't really care about this, maybe because life oftentimes is not fair and thus being productive is not seen as important as it ought to be? Idk but I find it an important question, culturally.

coderintherye 3y ago
The poker player is providing entertainment for others. It's really not much different than working on a company backed by a rich investor where the CEO skillfully plays their cards to maneuver more money out of the rich fish while the other players also try to get what they can out of them.
- zone411 3y ago
  > The poker player is providing entertainment for others. Yes, and the top earners in poker aren't always the best players, but rather skilled players who have some personality instead of putting on headphones and grinding and get invited to lucrative private games.
  - nadermx 3y ago
    till you don't
- watwut 3y ago
  Poker players search for weak opponents to extract money from them in games where no one watches. That is the income of full time poker players.
- bluecalm 3y ago
  Entertainment is much better for recreational players without pro players in the game maybe with the exception of occasional tournament celebrity. Pro poker player doesn't provide anything to anyone with the exception of a challenge to other pro players.
jjxw 3y ago
Is this not also true for many sporting or competitive pursuits that are also effectively zero sum? For sports I suppose one could argue there are benefits to exercise and for other competitive games with professionals like chess there are mental benefits from getting good at them. However, neither seem particularly "productive" outside of all the money that is funneled into events for marketing purposes. There is, of course, perhaps some inherent aesthetic and community building around a common interest that is valuable, but I'd argue that the same is true for poker - I personally find the game of no limit hold'em interesting from a theoretical perspective and have met a lot of people that I would not have otherwise through playing it. Poker doesn't seem that much different to other abstracted competitive pursuits to me besides that it has a larger luck factor to it.
- ccooffee 3y ago
  In non-tournament settings, every dollar you win at poker comes out of the pockets of another player at the table. It's truly a zero-sum game, as adding up the gains and losses of players at the table will result in zero. In contrast, tournament games (chess, golf, tennis, WSOP, esports, etc) may have significant entry fees, but at a professional level the total winnings are significantly more than the sum of all entry fees. Generally the excess money comes from corporate sponsors or viewership fees. The entry fees can result in some players walking away with less money than they started, but I don't think this is common outside of tournament-play poker. The most popular professional sports (soccer, football, baseball, etc) have players on salaries. Those players often also get performance bonuses, either for entire-team results (winning the championship) or personal results (number of games played, statistical thresholds, etc). But they're all getting paid _something_ win or lose.
  - jjxw 3y ago
    For poker it's actually negative sum at most venues outside of private games due to the fees taken by the organizer (i.e. the rake). But yes, point taken that at least within the closed system of the game poker is zero/negative sum. My comment was more directed at the OP's assertion that poker is not 'productive' because it is zero-sum. I personally don't see how injecting corporate sponsors into otherwise zero sum games (only one team in sporting events can win, only one chess player can win the tournament) elevates competitive pursuits outside of poker to what can be considered 'productive'. OP's view could be that all of these pursuits are equally unproductive and that would be fair enough.
gen220 3y ago
I have a friend who got into poker in the 90s. He did a lot of studying and practicing at home, then took a bus down to Atlantic City to try his luck, goal was to pay for a ticket back. He ended up making a lot more money than that (more than he’d ever made in a paycheck up to that point!), but half of it was from a guy with more teeth out of his possession than in his possession. Most of his opponents were irrational addicts fighting personal demons. In the end, he decided gambling wasn’t for him, never went back to Atlantic City. Zero sum games are really depressing.
- Applejinx 3y ago
  Specifically, if you're fixing to earn serious money off playing poker, your job is to SEEK OUT irrational addicts fighting personal demons, and personify said demons. You're basically looking to find prey and eat them. The wounded will be less capable of running away from you. You could lurk outside the door and hit them with a rock or stab them with a knife, but that would be illegal. Functionally you're playing a similar role. You're stalking prey, trying to find the weak and hurt them, possibly until they die, knowing there will be more. I quite understand why people can get off on this, but I also understand why many healthy humans will be put off by it. It's playing up one aspect of humanity while totally stifling other aspects. Humans are also cooperative, but that's not going to make you money playing poker.
  - whoami_nr 3y ago
    Author here. I agree. We call it bum-hunting and its part and parcel of the game. I stopped live games mainly because I found it depressing to win from a guy who is obviously drunk or has a gambling problem.
    - Obscurity4340 3y ago
      I could never do that. Heck, I'm basically more or less always with a foot in that cesspool, so to speak. I can'timagine the horror at the end of the ride where you're out of house/home and resources and your dopaminergic system's still all fucked.
charlieyu1 3y ago
You can say this for a lot of careers though.
- plugin-baby 3y ago
  And perhaps the OP would.
nkingsy 3y ago
Years and years later I still have a fond memory of wiping a guy out for 5k in a 2-5nl game at Caesar’s during wsop. He was a fellow low level pro that had been bluffing me all night, making nice and chit chatting with me. Like thinking back now there is just zero remorse. Never saw him again. He didn’t have bus fare. It is a sanctioned place to have a battle of wits for money. Totally agree it is not good for the soul to grind it out at the tables long term, but for me it was all about the thrill of devastation, giving and taking. Very much not the case that I “didn’t care”. I met a great friend for a weekend traveling through Thailand after taking him for 10k online and noticing we were in the same country. I lost 20k in an online hand all in on the flop to a runner runner. I look back on that as a thrill, the most memorable of roller coasters.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
chx 3y ago
I am not so sure. This is like saying you lose on lottery because the state always wins in total. Money wise yes but when you have a lottery ticket you entertain yourself with hopes and can dream about what you'd do with the megabucks. If you feel good for a while because of it ... did you really lose? Same with poker. Sure, you can only win if someone else loses but what if they had fun? In other words, is going to the cinema a net loss?
- monero-xmr 3y ago
  I play poker because it’s fun. I’m decent, I have won a few 100+ NL tournaments in Vegas and finish in the money as often as not. But I’m gambling well within my means, which is different for everyone. I have no idea if I take $1000 from someone if that’s their rent for the month or if it’s budgeted for entertainment. Gambling is ancient and wired deep in the human psyche. It’s neither morally right nor morally wrong. It is just something we enjoy as a species. I feel bad for people addicted, but I also feel bad for people addicted to alcohol or addicted to reading the news. Everyone needs to moderate their own consumption.
  - sarchertech 3y ago
    People who get addicted to the news don’t tend to lose their houses as a result. Historically most societies have restricted gambling to one extent or the other because it’s clear that there is a subset of the population who can’t self moderate, and this results in a significant cost to everyone else. We’re currently in a period of loosening regulations and we’ll see how that goes. Early results aren’t great.
    - monero-xmr 3y ago
      We let people put their houses up as collateral in order to get a small business loan to start a restaurant. Statistically speaking those restaurants will be losers 80% of the time. They would be better off playing roulette and putting their house on black https://home.binwise.com/blog/restaurant-failure-rate#:~:text=Frequently%20Asked%20Questions%20About%20Why%20Do%20Restaurants%20Fail,-What%20Percentage%20of&text=The%20National%20Restaurant%20Association%20estimates,success%20rate%20for%20all%20restaurants https://home.binwise.com/blog/restaurant-failure-rate#:~:tex....
waprin 3y ago
Poker is one of America's favorite past time and many losing players enjoy the act of going to a cardroom and playing with others. We've often bemonaed the lack of "third places" like churches and the ensuing rise of loneliness, and cardrooms can serve as one of these third places. I find it interesting that professional poker players are frequently criticized for this but I've never seen someone criticize a casino dealer or other employee for this.
- chrisco255 3y ago
  Yeah really, all the other games in the casino are far worse than "zero sum".
- RugnirViking 3y ago
  > I've never seen someone criticize a casino dealer or other employee for this. You've never seen someone critising the gambling industry for preying on the mentally ill and troubled? That's extremely common
- Ekaros 3y ago
  In same way I don't think I have heard fast food employees or employees in food manufacturing criticised for producing the food. Or candy or whatever. The perception of role might be, but not for the product they are participating in ...
baby 3y ago
Would you say the market is like that also
saucymew 3y ago
Many competitive games/sports where you are trading ELO or rankings (chess, RTS, boxing) are like this, but I wouldn't judge it outright as "not productive." I'd reckon it's more about the journey, the stories and friends we made along the way, even though there may be few. Whenever someone asks, "Why do they do that?" I always share the man who holds the Guinness World Records for rolling an orange with their nose: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66xwQZuic3E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66xwQZuic3E Why not?
- hnbad 3y ago
  I find it hard to understand how you could argue it's productive when it is literally about exploiting other people's inexperience, naivety or honesty (lacking a "poker face") in order to take their money from them. It doesn't produce anything. At best you could argue it's a form of entertainment but it's not even good at that except as an observer sport. Gambling, for most people, is ultimately a form of fraud. It's built on the narrative that you can get rich quick. Gambling is for the winners. The losers are just paying for it. The narrative hinges entirely on numbing the mark's rationality and making them not think about the odds, getting them to keep throwing money at you until they go bankrupt. Rolling an orange on the other hand is something you can do entirely by yourself without harming anyone except the people you inconvenience if you do it somewhere public. Neither activity is productive but at least rolling an orange with your nose isn't actively anti-social unless you're a dick about it.
dghughes 3y ago
I'm not a poker player but I worked at a small casino. We had training sessions;new dealers, surveillance staff training, security staff training, supervisor training, cage training and I as a slot tech sat in as a filler customer. It was obvious after many hands the only winner is the non-loser as silly as that sounds. The one who sucks the least wins. Even with two players who always did really well if they were the last two it was basically whichever made a mistake is who lost. A bit like chess checkmate you never really stomp on the queen it's obvious to both it's over.
vintermann 3y ago
Yeah, and I think it's also an indictment of poker as a game. It's exciting? So would most games be, if played for high stakes! It can't be a very fun game in itself, if it needs stakes to be fun. There are so many games out there. If it's really about the satisfaction of getting better, the social aspect, and all those other things, why not pursue it in one of the other games?
- Semaphor 3y ago
  I used to have a lot of fun playing poker for pennies, started in high school (we literally saved up pennies to play with during breaks), later online once that became a thing. The only requirement was that some stake existed, without any, it was a different game
- Rastonbury 3y ago
  Poker is hugely fun in and of itself to most people, the amount of imperfect information, dealing with human nature, mental calculations under pressure. I love playing house games with my friends That said poker for fun and poker to make a living are almost indistinguishable, to make serious money multi-table grinds for 8 to 10 hours a day and the reasons outlined by OP article
- somenameforme 3y ago
  It's fun even for imaginary stakes, so long as they're limited. The reason you need stakes is not for the adrenaline, but because the stakes work kind of like 'life' in a video game. If you had infinite life the game would be stupid, because you could just rambo through everything. Same thing in poker. You could just go all-in every hand, because why not? This is why some people like things like sit-n-go's or tournaments, where you pay a fixed sum once and then get a good amount of play in but where people will still take it very seriously.
kwar13 3y ago
Think of it as entertainment. What does the average professional athlete really add to the world? Poker advances your understanding of probability and statistics, bet sizing, drawdown management, and many other skills that would be useful in the real world. Watching baseball on TV, not sure what you take away from that. Playing sports build health and community and that is a huge benefit in itself, but for some reason poker gets all the negative stigma and little of the benefit in perception.
- throwaway2037 3y ago
  poker gets all the negative stigma For me, the reason is simple: gambling. The vast majority of people who gamble lose. That's it. Once you see that truth, the whole industry looks horrible. In the last 30 years, gambling has invaded so many communities in the United States for a very much negative effect. It is a tragedy. And, the more normalised gambling becomes, the more addicts it will product.
ploum 3y ago
Same can be said of trading (unlike investing, where you hope your money will help build something). When you buy and sell stocks for a profit, it is because someone has a loss (or will have at some point).
kybernetikos 3y ago
If you don't count human entertainment and skill as a positive then it's not just poker you'll find depressing, but also almost all media, sport and games. It's an absolutely massive 'unproductive' chunk of the economy. I've played in small poker tournaments where there was a buy in which went to charity and the prizes were provided by local businesses. That's positive sum. Poker itself can be exciting and entertaining to watch, it is televised for entertainment, and has sponsors. In smaller contexts it's a social event that brings people together. It has produced books, and culture and life lessons (I can't think of better training in outcome bias), it's synonymous with learning to control your emotions. You gotta know when to hold em... While I think you make an interesting point, I don't think the situation is terribly different for poker than it is for most sports unless you don't count the massive amount of unpaid time and injuries that even losing competitors often put into it as a cost.
- stewx 3y ago
  Who is benefiting from the "entertainment" in the OP's scenario?
- addictanon 3y ago
  The point is that you end up focusing your energies (often intentionally, but always by the nature of simply playing a lot) on exploiting gambling addicts. If you make films you aren’t targeting “film addicts” that go to the theater all day 7 days a week. They have a minimal effect on your outcome.
- Kranar 3y ago
  I would differentiate between entertainment and gambling. Sports and media get revenue from a massive audience of people who pay to watch it, and that revenue pays to promote solid talent within the field itself. If playing sports required taking money from the losers to pay the winners, and the people who lost the most amount of money are those who end up having some kind of addiction and serious problem that the winners are exploiting, then yeah, sports would be also be quite morally questionable. You are right that there is exploitation in sports and other forms of media, but I think most people can identify those aspects of sports and call them out.
somenameforme 3y ago
I think this is a rabbit hole that makes you want to pull out of it real fast. For instance consider how many tech jobs right now basically devolve into trying to make people see ads that they don't want to watch. Not only are you not adding value to the world, you're actively making it worse. Of course people can convince themselves with all sorts of rationalizations, like claiming you're introducing people to things that can make their lives better that they might not have otherwise known about. But that's just a fallacy. Good things, with or without advertising, gradually become known. Online ads are overwhelmingly about shoveling chaff down people's throats. And poker players have the same sort of rationalizations. You might view oneself as an athlete, or an entertainer, a competitor, or maybe even just an analyst. Many of those descriptors, in my opinion, fall closer to reality than ad delivery rationalizations, but again it's all just rationalizations anyway you look at it. The number of people working truly valuable jobs that genuinely improve society are few and far between, and they tend to pay terribly. Farmers being a textbook example. There are some good counter-examples like doctors, but even there there's an undesirable trend. Working at a poor public emergency institution is going to drive relatively low income and high stress. Go work as a plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills and you're driving an extremely high income and low stress work. All in all we have a pretty terrible system, but nonetheless it's almost certainly better than all the others.
- wenyuanyu 3y ago
  Ads are not zero-sum at all... Also most ads are not for the not known things... Coca Cola and Apple are among the top spenders on ads...
  - hnbad 3y ago
    Spend any time working in advertising and you'll fall down the "content marketing" rabbit hole. There's a lot of money in selling Pepsi its own logo or making sure people can't forget about a brand but there's even more money in content marketing and that's entirely a grift. Content marketing is like a void onion. It's layers upon layers of nothing and it all generates "passive income". Most of it exists to sell to other people who are doing content marketing as a get-rich-quick-scheme. Why bother doing a grift yourself if you can grift by selling your grift to other people and let them worry about how to make it actually work. The actual product and topic doesn't even matter. Is it investment advice? Mental health? Self-improvement? Weight loss? "Passive income"? Offer vacuous goodies like "free ebooks" to get people hooked and then continue selling and upselling them on the promise that if they just pay for one more Mastermind session, webinar, virtual retreat or coaching package, they'll figure it out eventually.
alberth 3y ago
> my main complaint about playing Poker as a living: it's a zero sum game This isn’t unique to Poker. This applies to all Gambling.
- stewx 3y ago
  My impression is that poker has been professionalized to a degree other forms of gambling have not.
  - alberth 3y ago
    Presumably why people view Poker different is, instead of trying to beat the Casino (Black Jack, etc), with Poker you're trying to beat another person. But regardless of it being the casino or another person, it's still a zero-sum game.
whoami_nr 3y ago
Author here. Yes, I did mention it in my post. It was actually a big reason I switched back to daily job inspite of making 10-15x for the 3years that I played. It was very good money but depressing af. More over, once you are financially secure ($1m is enough money to retire in India), it makes no sense to put yourself through it further.
antisthenes 3y ago
It's worse. It's a negative sum game.
sneak 3y ago
It’s not front and center, and frequently overlooked. I do have some issues spending so much time on a zero-sum game, as you mentioned, but ultimately it’s better that I have the money than people who are going to gamble it away; I’ll do something useful with it, and they probably won’t. "As Canada Bill Jones said, 'it's immoral to let a sucker keep his money.'"

by Tarsul 3y ago

coderintherye 3y ago

The poker player is providing entertainment for others. It's really not much different than working on a company backed by a rich investor where the CEO skillfully plays their cards to maneuver more money out of the rich fish while the other players also try to get what they can out of them.

zone411 3y ago
> The poker player is providing entertainment for others. Yes, and the top earners in poker aren't always the best players, but rather skilled players who have some personality instead of putting on headphones and grinding and get invited to lucrative private games.
- nadermx 3y ago
  till you don't
watwut 3y ago
Poker players search for weak opponents to extract money from them in games where no one watches. That is the income of full time poker players.
bluecalm 3y ago
Entertainment is much better for recreational players without pro players in the game maybe with the exception of occasional tournament celebrity. Pro poker player doesn't provide anything to anyone with the exception of a challenge to other pro players.

jjxw 3y ago

Is this not also true for many sporting or competitive pursuits that are also effectively zero sum? For sports I suppose one could argue there are benefits to exercise and for other competitive games with professionals like chess there are mental benefits from getting good at them. However, neither seem particularly "productive" outside of all the money that is funneled into events for marketing purposes. There is, of course, perhaps some inherent aesthetic and community building around a common interest that is valuable, but I'd argue that the same is true for poker - I personally find the game of no limit hold'em interesting from a theoretical perspective and have met a lot of people that I would not have otherwise through playing it. Poker doesn't seem that much different to other abstracted competitive pursuits to me besides that it has a larger luck factor to it.

ccooffee 3y ago
In non-tournament settings, every dollar you win at poker comes out of the pockets of another player at the table. It's truly a zero-sum game, as adding up the gains and losses of players at the table will result in zero. In contrast, tournament games (chess, golf, tennis, WSOP, esports, etc) may have significant entry fees, but at a professional level the total winnings are significantly more than the sum of all entry fees. Generally the excess money comes from corporate sponsors or viewership fees. The entry fees can result in some players walking away with less money than they started, but I don't think this is common outside of tournament-play poker. The most popular professional sports (soccer, football, baseball, etc) have players on salaries. Those players often also get performance bonuses, either for entire-team results (winning the championship) or personal results (number of games played, statistical thresholds, etc). But they're all getting paid _something_ win or lose.
- jjxw 3y ago
  For poker it's actually negative sum at most venues outside of private games due to the fees taken by the organizer (i.e. the rake). But yes, point taken that at least within the closed system of the game poker is zero/negative sum. My comment was more directed at the OP's assertion that poker is not 'productive' because it is zero-sum. I personally don't see how injecting corporate sponsors into otherwise zero sum games (only one team in sporting events can win, only one chess player can win the tournament) elevates competitive pursuits outside of poker to what can be considered 'productive'. OP's view could be that all of these pursuits are equally unproductive and that would be fair enough.

gen220 3y ago

I have a friend who got into poker in the 90s. He did a lot of studying and practicing at home, then took a bus down to Atlantic City to try his luck, goal was to pay for a ticket back. He ended up making a lot more money than that (more than he’d ever made in a paycheck up to that point!), but half of it was from a guy with more teeth out of his possession than in his possession. Most of his opponents were irrational addicts fighting personal demons. In the end, he decided gambling wasn’t for him, never went back to Atlantic City. Zero sum games are really depressing.

Applejinx 3y ago
Specifically, if you're fixing to earn serious money off playing poker, your job is to SEEK OUT irrational addicts fighting personal demons, and personify said demons. You're basically looking to find prey and eat them. The wounded will be less capable of running away from you. You could lurk outside the door and hit them with a rock or stab them with a knife, but that would be illegal. Functionally you're playing a similar role. You're stalking prey, trying to find the weak and hurt them, possibly until they die, knowing there will be more. I quite understand why people can get off on this, but I also understand why many healthy humans will be put off by it. It's playing up one aspect of humanity while totally stifling other aspects. Humans are also cooperative, but that's not going to make you money playing poker.
- whoami_nr 3y ago
  Author here. I agree. We call it bum-hunting and its part and parcel of the game. I stopped live games mainly because I found it depressing to win from a guy who is obviously drunk or has a gambling problem.
  - Obscurity4340 3y ago
    I could never do that. Heck, I'm basically more or less always with a foot in that cesspool, so to speak. I can'timagine the horror at the end of the ride where you're out of house/home and resources and your dopaminergic system's still all fucked.

charlieyu1 3y ago

You can say this for a lot of careers though.

plugin-baby 3y ago
And perhaps the OP would.

nkingsy 3y ago

Years and years later I still have a fond memory of wiping a guy out for 5k in a 2-5nl game at Caesar’s during wsop. He was a fellow low level pro that had been bluffing me all night, making nice and chit chatting with me. Like thinking back now there is just zero remorse. Never saw him again. He didn’t have bus fare. It is a sanctioned place to have a battle of wits for money. Totally agree it is not good for the soul to grind it out at the tables long term, but for me it was all about the thrill of devastation, giving and taking. Very much not the case that I “didn’t care”. I met a great friend for a weekend traveling through Thailand after taking him for 10k online and noticing we were in the same country. I lost 20k in an online hand all in on the flop to a runner runner. I look back on that as a thrill, the most memorable of roller coasters.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

chx 3y ago

I am not so sure. This is like saying you lose on lottery because the state always wins in total. Money wise yes but when you have a lottery ticket you entertain yourself with hopes and can dream about what you'd do with the megabucks. If you feel good for a while because of it ... did you really lose? Same with poker. Sure, you can only win if someone else loses but what if they had fun? In other words, is going to the cinema a net loss?

monero-xmr 3y ago
I play poker because it’s fun. I’m decent, I have won a few 100+ NL tournaments in Vegas and finish in the money as often as not. But I’m gambling well within my means, which is different for everyone. I have no idea if I take $1000 from someone if that’s their rent for the month or if it’s budgeted for entertainment. Gambling is ancient and wired deep in the human psyche. It’s neither morally right nor morally wrong. It is just something we enjoy as a species. I feel bad for people addicted, but I also feel bad for people addicted to alcohol or addicted to reading the news. Everyone needs to moderate their own consumption.
- sarchertech 3y ago
  People who get addicted to the news don’t tend to lose their houses as a result. Historically most societies have restricted gambling to one extent or the other because it’s clear that there is a subset of the population who can’t self moderate, and this results in a significant cost to everyone else. We’re currently in a period of loosening regulations and we’ll see how that goes. Early results aren’t great.
  - monero-xmr 3y ago
    We let people put their houses up as collateral in order to get a small business loan to start a restaurant. Statistically speaking those restaurants will be losers 80% of the time. They would be better off playing roulette and putting their house on black https://home.binwise.com/blog/restaurant-failure-rate#:~:text=Frequently%20Asked%20Questions%20About%20Why%20Do%20Restaurants%20Fail,-What%20Percentage%20of&text=The%20National%20Restaurant%20Association%20estimates,success%20rate%20for%20all%20restaurants https://home.binwise.com/blog/restaurant-failure-rate#:~:tex....

waprin 3y ago

Poker is one of America's favorite past time and many losing players enjoy the act of going to a cardroom and playing with others. We've often bemonaed the lack of "third places" like churches and the ensuing rise of loneliness, and cardrooms can serve as one of these third places. I find it interesting that professional poker players are frequently criticized for this but I've never seen someone criticize a casino dealer or other employee for this.

chrisco255 3y ago
Yeah really, all the other games in the casino are far worse than "zero sum".
RugnirViking 3y ago
> I've never seen someone criticize a casino dealer or other employee for this. You've never seen someone critising the gambling industry for preying on the mentally ill and troubled? That's extremely common
Ekaros 3y ago
In same way I don't think I have heard fast food employees or employees in food manufacturing criticised for producing the food. Or candy or whatever. The perception of role might be, but not for the product they are participating in ...

baby 3y ago

Would you say the market is like that also

saucymew 3y ago

Many competitive games/sports where you are trading ELO or rankings (chess, RTS, boxing) are like this, but I wouldn't judge it outright as "not productive." I'd reckon it's more about the journey, the stories and friends we made along the way, even though there may be few. Whenever someone asks, "Why do they do that?" I always share the man who holds the Guinness World Records for rolling an orange with their nose: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66xwQZuic3E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66xwQZuic3E Why not?

hnbad 3y ago
I find it hard to understand how you could argue it's productive when it is literally about exploiting other people's inexperience, naivety or honesty (lacking a "poker face") in order to take their money from them. It doesn't produce anything. At best you could argue it's a form of entertainment but it's not even good at that except as an observer sport. Gambling, for most people, is ultimately a form of fraud. It's built on the narrative that you can get rich quick. Gambling is for the winners. The losers are just paying for it. The narrative hinges entirely on numbing the mark's rationality and making them not think about the odds, getting them to keep throwing money at you until they go bankrupt. Rolling an orange on the other hand is something you can do entirely by yourself without harming anyone except the people you inconvenience if you do it somewhere public. Neither activity is productive but at least rolling an orange with your nose isn't actively anti-social unless you're a dick about it.

dghughes 3y ago

I'm not a poker player but I worked at a small casino. We had training sessions;new dealers, surveillance staff training, security staff training, supervisor training, cage training and I as a slot tech sat in as a filler customer. It was obvious after many hands the only winner is the non-loser as silly as that sounds. The one who sucks the least wins. Even with two players who always did really well if they were the last two it was basically whichever made a mistake is who lost. A bit like chess checkmate you never really stomp on the queen it's obvious to both it's over.

vintermann 3y ago

Yeah, and I think it's also an indictment of poker as a game. It's exciting? So would most games be, if played for high stakes! It can't be a very fun game in itself, if it needs stakes to be fun. There are so many games out there. If it's really about the satisfaction of getting better, the social aspect, and all those other things, why not pursue it in one of the other games?

Semaphor 3y ago
I used to have a lot of fun playing poker for pennies, started in high school (we literally saved up pennies to play with during breaks), later online once that became a thing. The only requirement was that some stake existed, without any, it was a different game
Rastonbury 3y ago
Poker is hugely fun in and of itself to most people, the amount of imperfect information, dealing with human nature, mental calculations under pressure. I love playing house games with my friends That said poker for fun and poker to make a living are almost indistinguishable, to make serious money multi-table grinds for 8 to 10 hours a day and the reasons outlined by OP article
somenameforme 3y ago
It's fun even for imaginary stakes, so long as they're limited. The reason you need stakes is not for the adrenaline, but because the stakes work kind of like 'life' in a video game. If you had infinite life the game would be stupid, because you could just rambo through everything. Same thing in poker. You could just go all-in every hand, because why not? This is why some people like things like sit-n-go's or tournaments, where you pay a fixed sum once and then get a good amount of play in but where people will still take it very seriously.

kwar13 3y ago

Think of it as entertainment. What does the average professional athlete really add to the world? Poker advances your understanding of probability and statistics, bet sizing, drawdown management, and many other skills that would be useful in the real world. Watching baseball on TV, not sure what you take away from that. Playing sports build health and community and that is a huge benefit in itself, but for some reason poker gets all the negative stigma and little of the benefit in perception.

throwaway2037 3y ago
poker gets all the negative stigma For me, the reason is simple: gambling. The vast majority of people who gamble lose. That's it. Once you see that truth, the whole industry looks horrible. In the last 30 years, gambling has invaded so many communities in the United States for a very much negative effect. It is a tragedy. And, the more normalised gambling becomes, the more addicts it will product.

ploum 3y ago

Same can be said of trading (unlike investing, where you hope your money will help build something). When you buy and sell stocks for a profit, it is because someone has a loss (or will have at some point).

kybernetikos 3y ago

If you don't count human entertainment and skill as a positive then it's not just poker you'll find depressing, but also almost all media, sport and games. It's an absolutely massive 'unproductive' chunk of the economy. I've played in small poker tournaments where there was a buy in which went to charity and the prizes were provided by local businesses. That's positive sum. Poker itself can be exciting and entertaining to watch, it is televised for entertainment, and has sponsors. In smaller contexts it's a social event that brings people together. It has produced books, and culture and life lessons (I can't think of better training in outcome bias), it's synonymous with learning to control your emotions. You gotta know when to hold em... While I think you make an interesting point, I don't think the situation is terribly different for poker than it is for most sports unless you don't count the massive amount of unpaid time and injuries that even losing competitors often put into it as a cost.

stewx 3y ago
Who is benefiting from the "entertainment" in the OP's scenario?
addictanon 3y ago
The point is that you end up focusing your energies (often intentionally, but always by the nature of simply playing a lot) on exploiting gambling addicts. If you make films you aren’t targeting “film addicts” that go to the theater all day 7 days a week. They have a minimal effect on your outcome.
Kranar 3y ago
I would differentiate between entertainment and gambling. Sports and media get revenue from a massive audience of people who pay to watch it, and that revenue pays to promote solid talent within the field itself. If playing sports required taking money from the losers to pay the winners, and the people who lost the most amount of money are those who end up having some kind of addiction and serious problem that the winners are exploiting, then yeah, sports would be also be quite morally questionable. You are right that there is exploitation in sports and other forms of media, but I think most people can identify those aspects of sports and call them out.

somenameforme 3y ago

I think this is a rabbit hole that makes you want to pull out of it real fast. For instance consider how many tech jobs right now basically devolve into trying to make people see ads that they don't want to watch. Not only are you not adding value to the world, you're actively making it worse. Of course people can convince themselves with all sorts of rationalizations, like claiming you're introducing people to things that can make their lives better that they might not have otherwise known about. But that's just a fallacy. Good things, with or without advertising, gradually become known. Online ads are overwhelmingly about shoveling chaff down people's throats. And poker players have the same sort of rationalizations. You might view oneself as an athlete, or an entertainer, a competitor, or maybe even just an analyst. Many of those descriptors, in my opinion, fall closer to reality than ad delivery rationalizations, but again it's all just rationalizations anyway you look at it. The number of people working truly valuable jobs that genuinely improve society are few and far between, and they tend to pay terribly. Farmers being a textbook example. There are some good counter-examples like doctors, but even there there's an undesirable trend. Working at a poor public emergency institution is going to drive relatively low income and high stress. Go work as a plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills and you're driving an extremely high income and low stress work. All in all we have a pretty terrible system, but nonetheless it's almost certainly better than all the others.

wenyuanyu 3y ago
Ads are not zero-sum at all... Also most ads are not for the not known things... Coca Cola and Apple are among the top spenders on ads...
- hnbad 3y ago
  Spend any time working in advertising and you'll fall down the "content marketing" rabbit hole. There's a lot of money in selling Pepsi its own logo or making sure people can't forget about a brand but there's even more money in content marketing and that's entirely a grift. Content marketing is like a void onion. It's layers upon layers of nothing and it all generates "passive income". Most of it exists to sell to other people who are doing content marketing as a get-rich-quick-scheme. Why bother doing a grift yourself if you can grift by selling your grift to other people and let them worry about how to make it actually work. The actual product and topic doesn't even matter. Is it investment advice? Mental health? Self-improvement? Weight loss? "Passive income"? Offer vacuous goodies like "free ebooks" to get people hooked and then continue selling and upselling them on the promise that if they just pay for one more Mastermind session, webinar, virtual retreat or coaching package, they'll figure it out eventually.

alberth 3y ago

> my main complaint about playing Poker as a living: it's a zero sum game This isn’t unique to Poker. This applies to all Gambling.

stewx 3y ago
My impression is that poker has been professionalized to a degree other forms of gambling have not.
- alberth 3y ago
  Presumably why people view Poker different is, instead of trying to beat the Casino (Black Jack, etc), with Poker you're trying to beat another person. But regardless of it being the casino or another person, it's still a zero-sum game.

whoami_nr 3y ago

Author here. Yes, I did mention it in my post. It was actually a big reason I switched back to daily job inspite of making 10-15x for the 3years that I played. It was very good money but depressing af. More over, once you are financially secure ($1m is enough money to retire in India), it makes no sense to put yourself through it further.

antisthenes 3y ago

It's worse. It's a negative sum game.

sneak 3y ago

It’s not front and center, and frequently overlooked. I do have some issues spending so much time on a zero-sum game, as you mentioned, but ultimately it’s better that I have the money than people who are going to gamble it away; I’ll do something useful with it, and they probably won’t. "As Canada Bill Jones said, 'it's immoral to let a sucker keep his money.'"