[jjxw]

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]

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]

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.

[boring_twenties]

In order to make money at sports you have to entertain others, i.e. produce entertainment for lots of people. Theoretically, you could win at poker without producing anything, but practically, the most profitable players will be the ones who at least produce entertainment for the people they play with...

[paulddraper]

> Is this not also true for many sporting or competitive pursuits that are also effectively zero sum?

No, absolutely not.

LeBron and Stephen Curry show up to a game, and both walk away hundreds of thousands richer.

---

In the top 1% of basketball games and the top 1% of poker games, they are sponsored and no one loses money.

And in the other 99% of basketball games, no money is involved. (People normally don't play pickup games for money.)

The other 99% of poker games involve players losing money.

[jjxw]

I meant zero sum in the closed loop of the game itself. Only one team can win, the reason why they are paid so much is because they have built an audience and the sponsors/teams are effectively built around advertising revenue and/or sales of merch.

Agreed on the distribution of who wins and who loses, most people don't lose money playing basketball. However, the point I am trying to make is writing off poker as "not productive" simply because it is monetarily zero sum (or negative sum in the case of raked games) is a disservice to the game itself.

[paulddraper]

Do the math however you'd like, but for one reason or other, poker games are the reason for foreclosure more of then than basketball games.

[jjxw]

Fair enough, if you look down on games of skill which involve chance and wagering money then there's not much I can do to change your mind.

[vintermann]

Look down on? I think gambling is harmful. That's quite independent on whether I "look down on" it or not.

I do suspect that poker can't be as inherently fun as most other card and board games of chance and skill, because if it was it shouldn't need high stakes to be exciting. But that's just a suspicion.

I have a philosophy of life, that I'd like to explain. Picture there's an immigrant. He comes from some far-off country with a very different culture. He didn't move by choice, he doesn't much like the culture of the county he came to. He'd like to protect his culture and raise his kids in it. He doesn't let them mingle, or get too involved in the culture around them. Naturally, he fails. Looking back on it as an old man, he realises that his kids have adopted not only the worst attributes of the surrounding culture, but they have kept the least sympathetic sides of the old culture, his culture too. And they're repeating his mistakes. "I should have let go", he laments. "I should have picked the things that actually matter, and asked them to hold on to just those, rather than trying to keep everything the way I was used to."

I've told it as a story about immigration, because then it's quite easy to believe, right? But truth is, even if we never move to another country, we move to the future. Culture changes. We are that immigrant dad. We too, if we just try to hold on to what we're familiar with, will lose. We need to make conscious choices about what really matters, what's worth holding onto, and what we can let go. If we just coast along without thinking, we'll keep bad traditions and make new bad traditions too.

Gambling culture is one of those things I want to let go. Become a thing of the past. Recycled into something better. I do love modern board and card games, which manage to be fun without high stakes, smoky rooms and martinis. It's not that I don't understand the glamourous appeal of of all that, I am your "countryman" in that regard. It's just not what I want to save.

[jjxw]

The vast majority of people who play poker do not play it for the "high stakes, smoky rooms, and martinis". Speaking for myself, I regularly play for very low stakes with friends in my own place of residence and we enjoy it as both as an intellectual pursuit and something to socialize over.

Obviously your viewpoint is perfectly valid - there are plenty of people who have been irreparably harmed by gambling culture and the way that poker is marketed largely does itself no favors in that regard. My point is that degenerate culture and poker can be separated and there are absolutely healthy ways to enjoy a hobby which, yes, has a luck element to it, but also requires precise study and meticulous decision making to excel at.

From what I've read I think you are conflating the predatory nature of casinos with the game of poker. Those two things are certainly linked, but I would argue that it would be a mistake to write off a game like No Limit Texas Hold'em as irredeemably harmful due to the association.

[sneak]

Poker has taught me so many things about life that I probably never would have learned otherwise. Yes, it’s gambling and there is a random element, but it’s a strategy game played in the currency of the world in which it is set. This has wide philosophical implications far beyond the poker table.

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Put it on my tombstone: “he got it in good”.

[dessimus]

>In the top 1% of basketball games and the top 1% of poker games, they are sponsored and no one loses money.

I don't know, I hear lots of sports fans complain about the money earned by athletes that one might think that the owners are only moments from bankruptcy because of those greedy players' salaries!

[vintermann]

The gambling aspect is a pretty obvious difference! There's nothing - or well, little - stopping you from gambling high stakes at chess, or go, or scrabble or dominion. It's just that those games are fun without gambling. Even some games that used to be heavily about gambling, like backgammon, have mostly turned into straight recreational games. But no-gambling poker really hasn't caught on. My guess it's that it's casinos, and a certain casino-adjacent culture/aesthetic, that has kept poker alive as a gambling phenomenon in this day and age.

Should we let casinos shape our culture in this way?

[lmm]

Something like football or chess or Formula 1 is valuable in itself; there's a beauty and elegance in seeing the hard thing done well.

In poker even the thing you're celebrating is zero-sum. Could person A fool person B or could person B read them; that's not people collaborating to create something in the way that two tennis players beating out a long rally are, that's just A vs B. And so much of the game is simply random luck - does the right card fall or not - and that's what people want to see; you might say there's skill in the game and that might be true, but people don't watch poker for the chess moments where someone makes a brilliant move, they watch it for the moments when the right number comes out of the random box. The larger luck factor matters.

[jjxw]

I enjoy chess and Formula 1 too! I think poker is broadly misunderstood to be a game of luck disguised as a game of skill when in reality it is very much a game of skill in the long run. The "long run" here being hundreds of thousands of hands.

There are absolutely brilliant plays in poker at its highest levels when a player finds an interesting line with a particular hand. I agree that most poker "highlights" are not of this variety, but instead highlight the gambley nature of the game, but that is not the whole story. To me, studying and understanding the dynamics of good poker strategy has the exact same beauty and elegance which you use to describe football / chess / Formula 1.

I'd fully agree that the way poker markets itself in many contexts definitely leans into the degenerate nature of it and does itself no favors. However, there is a very complex beautiful game of skill behind all of it.

[qkeast]

I’m genuinely curious—what makes for an “interesting line with a particular hand?” Do you have any examples?

[jjxw]

I found this one [1] pretty interesting - finding a raise with top pair weak kicker is not intuitive. There is some solver work in this video which is probably overly technical for a casual observer, but will give a bit of flavor on how poker is studied at a high level.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jNVRwTSN-A

[bluecalm]

In most sports money come from sponsorship. It's not a zero sum game but positive sum game where you compete for the value added (from the player's perspective)