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Message: [QUOTE="OzExorcist, post: 2323603, member: 23910"] Sure it's a different form of gambling to lotteries or roulette or slots and sure, there's absolutely a skill element to poker (I wouldn't be on this site or playing poker if I believed otherwise). But that doesn't change the fact that it [b]is[/b] gambling. And the PPA is absolutely barking up the wrong tree trying to "prove" otherwise. Here's why: The kind of people who are against online poker on moral grounds will [b]never, ever[/b] change their minds just because someone argues that, on a technicality, if you're good enough and play for long enough, poker isn't [i]really[/i] gambling. They'll just point to any one of the hundreds of thousands of people who've lost their life savings playing poker and say "well if it's not gambling, how did it destroy this person's life?". It's an argument the PPA can never win, because broke person trumps skilled grinder every single day of the week. It's also a pointless argument to make when trying to convince people whose objections are about things other than poker being gambling: the ones who think it'll cost jobs in the brick and mortar casino sector, for example, don't care whether poker is defined as gambling or not, they just care that the status quo will be upset. The ones who are worried about it being a vessel for money laundering don't care that it's gambling, they just care about whether money is getting laundered or not. If you make "it's not gambling" the central issue then you fail to address any of the legitimate concerns people might have, and you draw attention to the one battle that you simply can't win. Better to dismiss the whole gambling/not gambling issue and focus on the reality: people want to play this game, and if you legalise it, tax it and regulate it everyone is a hell of a lot better off than if you don't. [b]A serious side question on the issue:[/b] We can argue all day over whether a pro with a proven track record of being profitable, like Phil Ivey, is "gambling". But consider Joe Public, who doesn't really know much about the game. Knows the basic rules, but has never read a book, doesn't know much about odds or outs or anything. He goes into a casino on a Friday night after a few drinks and sits down in a poker game. [b]Is Joe Public gambling?[/b] [/QUOTE]

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