bernotas22 said:
uhm......poker players are gamblers if they weren't it would be a game of chess, poker has luck if you did not know and it is a form of gambling
Yeah I avoided commenting on this earlier, but now that it's bumped back up, I will.
There isn't a poker player alive that doesn't understand that chance (luck) is a factor in poker. How much of a factor, however, depends in you and your skill level. The problem is that the vast majority of poker players are bad, losing players who leave far more to chance than to skill.
On the spectrum of wagering games, with total chance at one end and total skill at the other, poker is one that moves way more towards the skill side than the chance side. While some (bad) players treat it like any other gambling game, good players will never look at poker as "gambling." In fact many find the categorization of poker as gambling an offensive one.
Poker certainly has aspects of chance, but so does virtually every other activity we do on a daily basis. Take driving for instance. Imagine an experiment where someone who has never driven is compared with someone who has driven for 20 years. Put them both in a car and have them navigate a high-traffic route to the same destination. There is certainly a "chance" that the experienced drive has an accident and the first-time driver arrives unscathed... but the
odds are pretty heavily against that. Now take 100000 of each type of driver and compare the results. Skill will very quick materialize as the chief attribute behind the long term and hopefully obvious results.
With skill, the affects of chance and variance in poker can be reduced such that results will always heavily favor skill over chance, to a degree unlike almost any other wagering game. Because poker is played against other players, not against the house with a predetermined edge. Hence the distinction that poker is a skill game rather than a "gambling" game.
