[deluz35]

The analogy I've come up with is that a good poker player has an edge over his average opponent, just as the casino has an edge in the gambling games it offers to the public. In essence, a good poker player acts as his own mini casino, constantly applying his small edge over thousands of hands. If they can accept that the "house always wins" in the long run, then it should not be a great leap of logic to understand that the best poker players will always win in the long run, even though they may get unlucky and lose in the short run.

The problem is the people who have never played may not understand the skill element in poker. For these people, have them look up "Game Theory" in Wikipedia. I suspect that the vast majority of people who do not understand poker skill have an aversion to math, strategic games, and binary logic, and may resist the fact that there is life skill involved in making decisions with incomplete information based on a probabilistic assessment of historical patterns.

Another way to explain the social utility of internet poker is to say that a good poker player is providing an entertainment service, allowing people to gamble and test their wits in a strategic game environment against other humans (as opposed to "the house") from the comfort of their own home.