[greyhawke54]

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I kind of agree with your friend.

Didn't Jesus start out playing on IIRC for rating points? He said the competition was very tough.

The thing is, the really good players that play now are in it for the money, and the "top" play money players are just not in the same league. To get good competition, you just have to play for money today. The only way the argument would work is if the good players would play with play money, and that isn't going to happen. So your friend has a point in a theoretical world, but it won't work in the real world.

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The big thing with the person I was debating this with is that they do not think that a person can really make any kind of a living gambing in any way. In their backround have been problem gamblers, so their view of poker and gambling is colored by this past. In their opinion anyone who gambles has a problem they just have not admitted to it yet.

I know I will never convince this person otherwise. What I was bothered by is that another person that was there also thought the argument was sound. They are both from very different political backrounds.

The thing is that we on this forum see poker way differently than most people in the rest of the world. What I am afraid of is that there are more people out there that would agree with this argument and not look at it the way we do. What I was hoping to accomplish with this post is to see some arguments that stepped outside of ourselves. Most of the responses dont really take into account how the other person thinks about the issue.

I actually thought that as poker player we should be better able to do this than most. As figuring out how the other guy is thinking and how to best use that is one of the skills that we as poker players specialize in.