Poker is Good for You

[Poker Clif]

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Don't forget that poker can be addictive and is an addiction to many people. This is a big reason why 'they' want to ban poker

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Banning something because it can be addictive to a small number of people is silly.

Should alcohol be banned because some people choose to misuse it/abuse it?

And why would it be a better idea to ban poker than cigarettes, which are also addictive, but cost many people their lives and not just some poker chips?

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Actually, I would make the case that if any one substance should be banned, then it should be alcohol. I worked in a rescue mission for 12 years, and just from that small sample, which you can extend to an awful lot of friends and family members that are affected, alcohol definitely has a negative affect on more than a few people.

Some of the effects are obvious and intuitive, such as drunk drivers, lost jobs, and broken homes(often including domestic violence). But there are other, less obvious costs both to individuals and society.

I saw a television show on one of the big three networks where an ER doctor was asked what percentage of what he sees in the ER is alcohol-related. Without hesitation, he said 50%.

He gave as a typical example someone who is treated for a broken arm, when the cause is the person getting drunk and falling down the stairs.

To put it another way, 50% of the cost of running an ER, and who knows what percentage of other health care costs, is devoted to alcohol

If we are going to talk about which habit or addiction is worse, it's alcohol. Nothing else comes close.

[JKratzer]

i thought it was well written and certainly brought up many good points, hopefully it will have the desired effect.

unfortunately i don't think it will, at least to me it came across as too much propaganda/biased agruments. i don't disagree with anything said in the article, just the tone in which it was delivered.

maybe (hopefully) it's just me.

[PuertoKid]

Poker doesn't teach you any of the things listed in the article. The best poker players have those skills (did they learn them because of poker, or are they good at poker because they already have those skills?), but there are plenty of people who have played poker a long time who do not have those skills.

To learn to play poker well one must either already have many of the skills listed, or be able to learn them. But the vast majority of poker players never become good. I wouldn't be so quick to proclaim poker to be the solution to the United State's educational deficiencies.

[c double]

It's a pretty good read, but I wouldn't expect this to affect the public opinion on poker in any significant way. Only someone who has played the game can understand how it can change the way you look at situations in your life away from the table. Besides that, there are no statistics or even examples provided to support any of his claims, some of which seem pretty far-fetched.

[Sherman]

I have a contention with the "Poker is a great teacher" part of the article:

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Research clearly proves that people tend to repeat rewarded actions and to discontinue punished ones. Poker teaches by rewarding desirable actions such as thinking logically and understanding other people and by punishing undesirable ones such as ignoring the odds and acting impulsively.2 Other learning principles also apply to poker.

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This makes the assumption that winning or making money is the "reward" for people playing poker. As Dr. Schoonmaker has pointed out himself many times, this is not the soul reason a person plays poker. In fact, many people play poker knowing full well that they expect to lose money. But they play because they recieve various other "rewards" including but not limited to a) friendships, b) a good time, and c) fulfilling gambling impulses.

For these people, poker does not necessarily teach them to think logically and to pay attention to odds. In fact, for people who gain the aforementioned rewards by losing, poker reinforces illogical thinking and ignorance of odds because in doing so, they gain friendship and fulfill their gambling impulses.

Sherman

Edit: For spelling.

[MyTurn2Raise]

article is pretty crappy


takes it from the development of the individual perspective, but overlooks a few key things

-At what costs?
-What about the path not taken?

There are other methods to learn all of these lessons that don't have the negative personal and societal costs. The alternative to playing poker is not nothing. There is a chunk of time that very well could involve activities that improve a person in all those ways and then some.


For a fun exercise....swith reality television with poker in the article and its main points. I know I could contsruct the exact same argument for reality tv.

[benfranklin]

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swith reality television with poker in the article and its main points. I know I could contsruct the exact same argument for reality tv.

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You are overlooking the gratuitous sex of reality TV, a socially redeeming aspect which is definitely lacking in poker.

[Mr. Now]

Mason, Dynasty, et al:

Please make a sticky for this forum, post this article as a locked thread and include it in the sticky.

If this article scrolls, the purpose of it is defeated.

[daveT]

Poker is good for me because if it wasn't for poker, there would be little other resources for making a living wage. For a small amount of money, relative to college, I am able to earn what a trained office professional is able to learn.

As a professional, I am riddled with addiction. This is the healthiest way that I am able to outlet my addictions.

There is very little that I can say to a casual player of why I play. Many casual players do not care, nor take the pride to learn much in their daily lives. Most Americans do not care to read, persue good music, or appreciate art. In a society that still believes that the proper path to education is schooling, this article is going to ring as contradictory.

Most people do not take the time to analyze and reflect upon lessons in life and strategy in life. The average person never read Carnegie, always seeks out employment, and has children long before they are ready. They take the lives that they have now and eat off the plates that are served for them. Trying to talk to people like they are going to improve to some sort of professional executive thinker is not going to work.

I took many dives in my life that where poorly calculated, and even now, I do not believe that knowing how to play poker would have changed anything in my life. I have always been good at games of strategy. Saying that applying this to my life sound like a bunch of BS to me, even.

If people really want to change their lives, and learn, we all need to have experiences. An actor in Orlando is going to quickly figure out that there is no future in Disney World. They will go to LA or NY and fail, fail, fail, and with experience, succeed. I am not convinced that playing poker is going to help this person.

So what happens if all of a sudden I cannot play on-line? I am not going to quit playing poker. I will adjust to the conditions. I will go back to playing in a real casino. No big worry there. Howard Stern was fined over and over again. Did he quit? No, he went where he could express himself and now earns more money than he used to. Did poker teach him this? No. Life taught him this. That he was shrewed enough and thoughtful enough to pull off his success is a reflection of the spark that drove him to succeed in the first place.

Poker will never teach the attributes to learn it.

I think that the biggest test is to say that anyone can learn to become successful at this game, that I can teach anyone to be a winning player by plugging in these attributes. This is outrageous. This forum itself is a testament to how many players are busted out and can't figure out how to beat the game, even after reading 15 books, playing for hours, doing the math, and studying the threads. Many people may be collapsing "as the palm trees are on the horizon." Poker is a ruthless game to win at. Only a select few can say they can beat it. Out of these few, a handful can say that they have mastered all the attributes to truly succeed at it. I would never take the time to teach anyone from scratch. Many people simply don't have the interest to learn something like math. And why would they want to learn for some game anyways.

[David Sklansky]

To be successful at poker means that you must have most of the attributes mentioned in the essay. Attributes that will serve you well in other aspects of your life. If you don't have them already you have to learn them if you want to win. Furthermore this necessity to learn them becomes pretty obvious fairly quickly to any intelligent aspiring player or student of the game. A game that is unrivaled in as far as the sheer number of different attributes that are in fact required.

The above summary of our essay contains information that is not well known to non players.

All the rest is details.