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Message: [QUOTE="OzExorcist, post: 2324355, member: 23910"] My point is that for every Phil Ivey there's multiple Joe Publics. By definition, for there to be winning players in poker there have to be losing players - and those losing players are, at best, gambling. At worst they're just throwing money away with [i]no[/i] hope of a return... but let's not draw too much attention to that. So the absolute [i]best[/i] case you can make is that poker is not gambling [b]for less than half of the people playing the game[/b]. Y'know, I'll concede that starting up your own business fits the definition of gambling: you're putting up a stake (the startup capital) on an event with an uncertain outcome (the success of the business) with the intent of making more money. I still don't see how that's an argument for working as an employee being gambling though. First of all, it's laughable to suggest that [i]everyone[/i] currently working as an employee has the capacity and opportunity to start up their own business and earn 10 times their current salary. And even if it were gambling to work as an employee, it's a far less risky gamble than starting your own business. Put in poker terms, you're saying that someone who only sits in play money games is gambling because they could be using that same time to play $100NL, and someone who plays $100NL is gambling away the income they could be getting from playing the nosebleeds. The reality is that the play money player would almost certainly lose their money at $100NL, and the $100NL player would almost certainly lose their money at the nosebleed tables. In the same way, the vast majority of people would probably just lose their startup capital and end up worse off financially than when they started if they set up their own business. Whether or not employees have made separate financial decisions that carry a large risk, such as taking out a big mortgage or deciding how to invest their retirement savings, is a secondary issue IMO, and unrelated to the question of whether employment is "gambling" or not. Note too that you're making out the worst possible case for employment (company going bankrupt, committing fraud, losing retirement savings) while ignoring all the worst cases for poker (being robbed while leaving the casino, being cheated in the game, online site not honouring your withdrawls, being an Ultimate Bet customer, etc) Here's the way I see it: the only thing certain in life is death. If you stretch the definition far enough yes, you can define pretty much everything else as gambling. But even if you do that, it's insane to suggest that playing poker is [b]less[/b] of a gamble than working as an employee. I don't get the endgame here either. Are you seriously trying to convince yourself (or someone else) on this point to justify choosing to play poker instead of getting a job or something?!? Because you don't need to redefine gambling to do that, you just need to know whether or not you earn more from poker than working :p [/QUOTE]

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