Interesting Thoughts

I was reading a post of young poker professional Terrence Chan and really liked some of the thoughts. One of the smaller themes about all choices in life being a "gamble" also hit a note with me. Everytime you choose to take someone up as a friend or put trust in someone, youre taking a gamble. All relationshiops with people, whether study buddies, friends, or dates is a gmable of some sort. Even if you think theres a 95% chance someone is trustwothy, theres that 5% chance they will fuck you over. All life decisions are made be you identifying the options, the chances of each choice working out, and then making the choice you deem correct. The same is true in poker.

Anyways, heres his thoughts on the term gambling for poker:
"....I think those that haughtily denounce the use of "gambling" to describe poker -- well-intentioned though they may be -- aren't focusing their energy in the right place.

It isn't that poker isn't gambling. I think that's an absurd position to take. It's a game where people bet on the cards in one's hand and the probability of the cards in one's opponents' hands and the probability of certain cards coming. Such an activity can be described as nothing other than gambling. Poker players (and other, much smaller groups of gamblers) often argue that it's not gambling if you have an advantage. This is simply absurd. Of course it is. It's simply gambling with an advantage. Re-defining "gambling" as "some card or dice game where everyone loses" is not constructive.

The problem lies not in the idea of "poker as gambling", but as gambling as an inherently bad thing in itself. The problem is that gambling is looked down upon in our society as a negative, unproductive activity. The perhaps natural reaction is to disassociate the game we love from this icky, bad thing by using distinguishing factors that in fact are not distinguishing at all. I mean really. If I'm getting 3.99:1 on a 4:1 shot I'm gambling, but if I'm getting 4.01:1 I'm not, because I have "an advantage"? Come on.

The fact of the matter is that *everything* we do in life is "gambling" in one sense or another because it involves uncertainty. Your decision whether to cross the street to buy a litre of milk involves an element of gambling. You must estimate your probability of being hit by a car, multiply it by its associated cost, and subtract it by the probability you don't get hit by the car multiplied by the utility derived from the quart of milk less the cost of the quart of milk, less your value of time. Your decision whether to buy a Mercedes or a Ferrari involves gambling. Whether you ask Jane or Julie out on a date involves gambling.

I posit that any time you have to make a decision based on uncertainty regarding the probability of (an) event(s) occurring and/or uncertainty as to its payoff if it occurs, you are gambling! If you look at gambling the way I do, there is no need to disassociate poker from it. The problem is not the word gambling. It's peoples' reaction to the word, which is a result of the fact that they misunderstand its true nature."