From today's Wall Street Journal

[fishyak]

Harvard University, Howard Lederer and other "poker powers" have set out to prove that poker is a game of skill, not chance. This debate has implications for the ban on using credit cards to fund games of chance. The article also added some interesting points of history:

1) The word "poker" has French origins (that's too bad) Poquer = to bet.
2) The is a case in CA that held poker is a skill game and that case from 1989 kept our casinos open. Other states disagree.

Also worth noting is that some statistical heavyweights are throwing their computers into the ring on this debate. There are now MILLIONS of computerized hand histories available for analysis. Stephen Leavitt, (sp?) author of Freakonomics, (and one really smart dude) is looking to mine that data to determine what makes poker players winners or losers. Others are attempting to do the same thing.

With this much data, I believe some of these guys will be able to quantify, to the extent possibly, poker success and failure. The last time some one did this to a card game was card counting at blackjack. And look at what happened to blackjack. As soon as card counting became general information, the game was changed and for the worse. If these statisticians are successful at parsing out rules for success and failure and making that information cheaply available, will poker follow the same fate as blackjack? Will the game HAVE to be changed, for the worse, the same way blackjack had to be changed to "save" it? Your views?