I wrote a response article for QuadJacks defending the ongoing value of spreading awareness of poker as a skill game in the current political environment:
Check it out here: Poker Still Needs the Skill Game Argument.
Showing posts with label ethics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ethics. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 20, 2013
Friday, February 15, 2013
An open letter: A simple, sensible change to fix almost all amateur poker income tax inequities
To the IRS, and to the legislators, regulators, and operators of future US online poker markets:
A longstanding quirk of the US tax code relating to how non-professionals must report their poker income has persisted despite the explosion in poker's popularity over the past decade. This tax rule creates effective surtaxes on amateur poker play that vary wildly with a player's personal circumstances and very frequently exceed 100% of a player's actual earnings. It is long overdue, and more pressing now than ever as we stand on the verge of domestically-regulated internet poker, that our tax code catch up with modern poker by taxing its earnings in a reasonably consistent way.
The problem
Amateur poker players currently cannot simply report their net poker winnings. Instead, they must report the sum of their winning poker sessions (gross poker winnings) as income, taking the sum of their losing poker sessions as itemized deductions.
An amateur poker player's bottom-line income is correctly calculated as his or her net income for most tax considerations. However, there are several intermediate steps within the process of determining a taxpayer's income tax obligation that can trigger off of or otherwise treat as proxy for true income the taxpayer's Adjusted Gross Income (AGI), a figure which includes gross amateur poker winnings before losses are deducted.
Consider an amateur poker player who, for simplicity, alternates between winning $100 and losing $100 in a weekly poker game for a year. Although he has made no money, his poker play contributes $2,600 to his AGI, as he reports $2,600 in Gambling Winnings and takes $2,600 in Gambling Losses. There is no meaningful theoretical or practical sense in which gross poker winnings represent actual income. Not only is our example a net loser at the end of the year, but he or she certainly has not had $2,600 of any sort of income. He or she never even possessed that much money at any point during the year!
Having any aspect of the tax code consider this player to have $2,600 of some sort of income is akin to taxing corporate revenue as if it were its income, or to considering the holder of this stock to have had $1,000 in investment earnings over this year ($1,000 being the sum of returns only over days in which the stock increased in value).
Of course, this is not how taxes work on these sources of income, but this is the problem that amateur poker players face. Depending on an amateur poker player's level of play, choice of game, and frequency of beginning and ending sessions, his or her AGI can very easily exceed his or her true income by tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, with no upper limit to the potential AGI inflation for higher-stakes amateur players.
What are the impacts of an artificially-inflated AGI?
The tax code appears to be designed so as to consider AGI to be a reasonable measure of a taxpayer's income, and it seems that amateur poker play is one of the few common ways that a taxpayer's AGI can significantly exceed his or her actual income. An artificially-inflated AGI can bring about the following inequities for a taxpayer:
They're not currently paying these taxes, of course. That the status quo has gone untouched for so long is almost certainly due to the low tax compliance rate on poker income, whether it be due to conscious tax evasion of unreported income or to a lack of awareness that a losing year of poker would have any tax implications at all.
A solution that covers all nine inequities
This can be achieved by defining the length of a poker session to be an entire year of play. The definition of a poker session is currently lacking modern guidelines from the IRS anyway and will already require explicit or implicit clarification when the first domestically-licensed sites start reporting player results, so let's do it right.
Why is this a sensible solution?
To define a session as an entire year of play is actually quite appropriate for poker. Even many amateur poker players are, by the very nature of the game, quite businesslike in planning their financial risk, managing a segregated poker bankroll and focusing on long-term expectations for their play.
Reporting net instead of gross income for amateur poker players would also have the benefit of being consistent with what almost every reasonable American would expect and perhaps how many amateur poker players incorrectly report their poker income currently. There'd be no need to file any poker activity during a losing year, and, while contemporaneous records should still be required, the players who inevitably fail to keep proper session-by-session accounting would nonetheless have a reasonable chance of estimating their total win or loss at the end of a year.
Why should you care about fixing this problem?
IRS & Legislators: Fair public policy should never tax an activity at more than 100% of the income it generates. Even if you believe that there should be some sort of extra "sin tax" to discourage activities that may be resemble or enable gambling, the more appropriate way to address that should be a stable, flat fee that players could easily plan and account for.
Regulators: Proper consumer protection involves being transparent about the costs of using a service. Regulated online poker should absolutely involve compulsory reporting of winnings to the IRS, but to have that in place before repairing this issue is to set a trap that millions of Americans would unknowingly fall into and is an abdication of regulatory responsibilities.
Operators: Communicating the current state of amateur poker tax reporting to your online players would turn many customers (rightly) away, yet failure to do so will likely lead to a dramatic drop-off in your player base. A delayed-impact, often-unanticipated and occasionally-large annual fee for losing is not good for customer retention. This will have to be fixed eventually for your customer base to subsist and grow, so out of respect for your customers, please expend resources towards fixing it now.
Conclusion
This simple and sensible change will eliminate an undue and capricious tax burden on millions of present and future American amateur poker players. To fail to correct this prior to the spread of domestically-regulated internet poker is to ensure an inefficient outcome for all parties involved.
Frankly, this rationale applies to traditional gambling activities as well. However, the need for change is most crucial for poker, a competitive strategy game which naturally lends itself towards narrow edges over regularly-occurring play, compels conscious maintenance and management of a bankroll, and attracts intelligent, price-sensitive competitors.
I don't know exactly how the poker community goes about changing this part of the tax code. I suspect that players cannot do it alone. We need our industry to stay aware of this problem and to represent our mutual interests. Keep the dialogue going.
Sincerely,
Mike Stein
A longstanding quirk of the US tax code relating to how non-professionals must report their poker income has persisted despite the explosion in poker's popularity over the past decade. This tax rule creates effective surtaxes on amateur poker play that vary wildly with a player's personal circumstances and very frequently exceed 100% of a player's actual earnings. It is long overdue, and more pressing now than ever as we stand on the verge of domestically-regulated internet poker, that our tax code catch up with modern poker by taxing its earnings in a reasonably consistent way.
The problem
Amateur poker players currently cannot simply report their net poker winnings. Instead, they must report the sum of their winning poker sessions (gross poker winnings) as income, taking the sum of their losing poker sessions as itemized deductions.
An amateur poker player's bottom-line income is correctly calculated as his or her net income for most tax considerations. However, there are several intermediate steps within the process of determining a taxpayer's income tax obligation that can trigger off of or otherwise treat as proxy for true income the taxpayer's Adjusted Gross Income (AGI), a figure which includes gross amateur poker winnings before losses are deducted.
Consider an amateur poker player who, for simplicity, alternates between winning $100 and losing $100 in a weekly poker game for a year. Although he has made no money, his poker play contributes $2,600 to his AGI, as he reports $2,600 in Gambling Winnings and takes $2,600 in Gambling Losses. There is no meaningful theoretical or practical sense in which gross poker winnings represent actual income. Not only is our example a net loser at the end of the year, but he or she certainly has not had $2,600 of any sort of income. He or she never even possessed that much money at any point during the year!
Having any aspect of the tax code consider this player to have $2,600 of some sort of income is akin to taxing corporate revenue as if it were its income, or to considering the holder of this stock to have had $1,000 in investment earnings over this year ($1,000 being the sum of returns only over days in which the stock increased in value).
Of course, this is not how taxes work on these sources of income, but this is the problem that amateur poker players face. Depending on an amateur poker player's level of play, choice of game, and frequency of beginning and ending sessions, his or her AGI can very easily exceed his or her true income by tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, with no upper limit to the potential AGI inflation for higher-stakes amateur players.
What are the impacts of an artificially-inflated AGI?
The tax code appears to be designed so as to consider AGI to be a reasonable measure of a taxpayer's income, and it seems that amateur poker play is one of the few common ways that a taxpayer's AGI can significantly exceed his or her actual income. An artificially-inflated AGI can bring about the following inequities for a taxpayer:
- Taxpayers who reside or play in one of about a dozen "bad poker tax states" owe state income tax on their gross wins, with no state deduction permitted for gambling losses.
- A taxpayer who would otherwise take the standard deduction will either be unable to take gambling losses as an itemized deduction, or will lose out on the difference between his or her "real" deductions and the standard deduction.
- That taxpayer's spouse also loses his or her standard deduction, even if filing separately.
- The deductibility of medical expenses is limited by AGI, which includes winning poker sessions before losing poker sessions are deducted.
- Roth IRA contributions cannot be made by taxpayers whose AGI exceeds $127,000. Traditional IRAs have similar limits in cases where the taxpayer is covered by an employer pension plan.
- The Free Application for Federal Student Aid uses AGI instead of net income in determining the financial capability of a family to pay for a child's college education.
- Most non-poker itemized deductions are phased out at certain AGI thresholds.
- ... as are exemptions.
- A 3.8% surtax is applied on the investment income of "high-income" taxpayers, again determined by AGI.
They're not currently paying these taxes, of course. That the status quo has gone untouched for so long is almost certainly due to the low tax compliance rate on poker income, whether it be due to conscious tax evasion of unreported income or to a lack of awareness that a losing year of poker would have any tax implications at all.
A solution that covers all nine inequities
All nine inequities would be instantly and completely alleviated if amateur poker players could simply report their net annual poker winnings instead of reporting gross winnings and deducting gross losses.
This can be achieved by defining the length of a poker session to be an entire year of play. The definition of a poker session is currently lacking modern guidelines from the IRS anyway and will already require explicit or implicit clarification when the first domestically-licensed sites start reporting player results, so let's do it right.
Why is this a sensible solution?
To define a session as an entire year of play is actually quite appropriate for poker. Even many amateur poker players are, by the very nature of the game, quite businesslike in planning their financial risk, managing a segregated poker bankroll and focusing on long-term expectations for their play.
Reporting net instead of gross income for amateur poker players would also have the benefit of being consistent with what almost every reasonable American would expect and perhaps how many amateur poker players incorrectly report their poker income currently. There'd be no need to file any poker activity during a losing year, and, while contemporaneous records should still be required, the players who inevitably fail to keep proper session-by-session accounting would nonetheless have a reasonable chance of estimating their total win or loss at the end of a year.
Why should you care about fixing this problem?
IRS & Legislators: Fair public policy should never tax an activity at more than 100% of the income it generates. Even if you believe that there should be some sort of extra "sin tax" to discourage activities that may be resemble or enable gambling, the more appropriate way to address that should be a stable, flat fee that players could easily plan and account for.
Regulators: Proper consumer protection involves being transparent about the costs of using a service. Regulated online poker should absolutely involve compulsory reporting of winnings to the IRS, but to have that in place before repairing this issue is to set a trap that millions of Americans would unknowingly fall into and is an abdication of regulatory responsibilities.
Operators: Communicating the current state of amateur poker tax reporting to your online players would turn many customers (rightly) away, yet failure to do so will likely lead to a dramatic drop-off in your player base. A delayed-impact, often-unanticipated and occasionally-large annual fee for losing is not good for customer retention. This will have to be fixed eventually for your customer base to subsist and grow, so out of respect for your customers, please expend resources towards fixing it now.
Conclusion
This simple and sensible change will eliminate an undue and capricious tax burden on millions of present and future American amateur poker players. To fail to correct this prior to the spread of domestically-regulated internet poker is to ensure an inefficient outcome for all parties involved.
Frankly, this rationale applies to traditional gambling activities as well. However, the need for change is most crucial for poker, a competitive strategy game which naturally lends itself towards narrow edges over regularly-occurring play, compels conscious maintenance and management of a bankroll, and attracts intelligent, price-sensitive competitors.
I don't know exactly how the poker community goes about changing this part of the tax code. I suspect that players cannot do it alone. We need our industry to stay aware of this problem and to represent our mutual interests. Keep the dialogue going.
Sincerely,
Mike Stein
Thursday, February 17, 2011
The irrelevance of the Griffin/Qureshi prop bet to poker, and why there might be an abundance of gambling culture around our game
The Ashton Griffin/Haseeb Qureshi prop bet story has been making its rounds throughout the poker media for the last week or so. The short version of the story is that these two high-stakes poker players made a six-figure prop bet on whether or not Ashton could run 70 miles in 24 hours, risking not only Ashton's physical health but also their friendship. Haseeb's firsthand account of his side of the bet and his emotional struggle with it, in case anyone has somehow not read it yet, is a fascinating and well-written story (Part 1, Part 2).
I don't have any meaningful reactions to the actual events of this story that haven't already been expressed by plenty of others already. Among those who discussed the story, I thought crAAKKer and Bellatrix did a great job, and I generally share their views.
The story itself is perhaps less interesting than the poker community's fascination with it. Perhaps it was a slow news week, but many bloggers and podcasters seemed eager to draw conclusions from this story about the poker world as a whole, including an entire article from PokerNews about whether or not crazy prop bets like these are good for poker.
My concerns began when Haseeb himself was the first to claim to tie his degenerate experience to "the world of poker" (from Part 2 of his blog):
Did I miss the part of this story that was about poker?
The Griffin/Qureshi story does not involve poker at all. Sure, Griffin and Qureshi are both poker players. But it seems they are also, to use a phrase which gives them the benefit of the doubt, active high-stakes proposition bettors.
It's pretty clear that Haseeb's intent in the above quote is that there's something about the world of crazy prop bets or the overall baller lifestyle that's fundamentally unhealthy. But this world is not fundamentally related to poker.
Poker is a competitive strategy game, and many of its players enjoy it solely on that basis. They make rational investment decisions with respect to their poker career, and the financial risk associated with the random elements of a poker game is merely an unavoidable cost of playing. These players will never play casino games, bet sports, or make impulsive prop bets. They are not "gamblers" in any meaningful sense of the word; they would be much better described as long-term investors.
I would suggest that the Griffin/Qureshi story is a gambling story and NOT a poker story. With all due respect to the personal experience Haseeb was willing to share, the conclusions he has drawn in the quote above are not conclusions about the world of poker players. They are conclusions about the tiny world of gamblers who happen to have made it to the top of the world of poker players.
Accordingly, I don't see this story as having any sort of implications for the poker community. I don't see why it should be either good or bad for poker. And, beyond the novelty value of it being a story about two poker players, I don't see why it should be carrying nearly as much content in poker-related publications as it has been.
Is prop betting part of poker culture?
I admit that, holed up in my ivory tower, I am likely quite out of touch with the "real-world" poker culture, centered upon the fascinating antics of our most successful players, and I would not be so silly as to suggest that the culture of a particular game is confined entirely to the game itself. If poker players as a group are actually characterized by not only playing poker, but also by making crazy prop bets, then indeed that is part of the poker culture.
However, I would dispute the idea that prop bets are indeed characteristic of poker players. Rather, they are characteristic of a certain subgroup of poker players: gamblers who play poker. And it just so happens that the highest-stakes, highest-profile poker players in our world are probably especially likely to be gamblers. I can think of three reasons why.
1) Self-selection of gamblers to the game of poker
We'll keep the math light today, and we'll make up most of the numbers, just for the sake of illustration.
Let's separate society into those who like to gamble and those who do not. Pulling a number out of thin air, let's say that 5% of society enjoys gambling, in the sense of perhaps house-edge casino games or of unique wagers on uncertain-probability sporting events/prop bets (but NOT "gambling" merely in the sense of playing competitive strategy games for money, which is distinctly different from each of these).
Now let's separate society into those who like to play poker and those who do not. Using the PPA's estimate of 55 million American poker players of various levels, we might guess that around 17% of society likes to play poker. Some portion of this 17% likes poker because it's a competitive strategy game, some portion likes poker because it's a fun way to gamble, and some portion likes it for a combination of those reasons.
What does the overlap between these two groups look like? It seems reasonable to expect that gamblers should be more likely to get into poker than non-gamblers, for a few reasons:
The result is that about 14% of poker players are gamblers, versus 5% of the population as a whole. Therefore poker players as a group become more identified with gambling than other groups, despite the fact that no actual aspect of the game of poker has contributed to these effects.
Play with the numbers and the effects can be more drastic. If you take a broader view of "gambling" and let the percentage of gamblers exceed the percentage of poker players, the percentage of poker players that are also gamblers can get as high as you want.
2) Self-selection of gambling-predisposed poker players to higher-stakes play
We have seen in our analysis of the WSOP Main Event that high-stakes poker games demand either a high level of wealth or a high level of risk tolerance (or even risk-seeking-ness). Realistically, though, in the age of $100k-buyin tournaments and nosebleed cash games, the WSOP Main Event is pretty small. If we were to perform any sort of reasonable risk analysis on the highest-stakes games in the world, we'd find that tremendous levels of wealth are needed for a risk-averse individual to participate, and yet the general consensus is that very few players actually have a proper bankroll for these games.
Among rational players who aren't millionaires to begin with and who manage their poker career like a long-term, low-risk investment, few of them will ever be able to climb all the way up through the stakes and reach the highest-stakes games.
On the other hand, gamblers with the same skill sets as these rational players are likely to throw caution to the wind and move up too quickly, or impulsively play in stakes that are outright too high for them. Among this group, some of them will succeed and then maintain themselves at the higher stakes. Therefore, the highest-stakes games should have a significantly higher percentage of degenerate gamblers than the poker community as a whole.
3) The focus of media on interesting personalities
Finally, now that we've got our high-stakes players, the media will inevitably focus their attention on those players who produce the best stories. Gamblers (of various degrees) produce better stories than those who are more conservative with risk. Therefore we should expect an even higher percentage of the high-stakes players we hear about to have tendencies towards gambling than the high-stakes community as a whole.
All told, as we restrict our attention to the biggest poker players, we might expect as many as half of them to also be gamblers. Their gambling activity, which is at best tangential to the game of poker, will not be representative of the world of poker.
Conclusion: the REAL poker culture
The most talked-about members of the poker community are an extremely small sample of the entire poker community, and we should expect this sample to also be strongly biased in favor of people who are predisposed to degenerate gambling. The vast majority of the members of the world of poker would never dream of ever making a wager as ridiculous as that of Griffin and Qureshi. Even among successful, competitive, professional poker players, I expect that few of them share the view of poker culture that these prop bettors have.
Since this behavior is not characteristic of the vast majority of poker players, and since the behavior is completely unrelated to the game of poker (but probably related to a self-selecting subgroup of poker players), the culture of these crazy prop bets is a separate culture from that of poker.
Stories such as these should be neither good nor bad for poker. Suggesting that stories such as these are somehow inherent to or representative of poker, however, is almost certainly bad for poker, as well as incorrect.
I don't have any meaningful reactions to the actual events of this story that haven't already been expressed by plenty of others already. Among those who discussed the story, I thought crAAKKer and Bellatrix did a great job, and I generally share their views.
The story itself is perhaps less interesting than the poker community's fascination with it. Perhaps it was a slow news week, but many bloggers and podcasters seemed eager to draw conclusions from this story about the poker world as a whole, including an entire article from PokerNews about whether or not crazy prop bets like these are good for poker.
My concerns began when Haseeb himself was the first to claim to tie his degenerate experience to "the world of poker" (from Part 2 of his blog):
Something that I've come to think about is that perhaps there's something about the world of poker players that's fundamentally unhealthy. This generation of online poker players and its culture has existed for less than ten years, yet I've always had some assumption lodged deep in my psyche that if I'm not finding happiness through poker that it's just something wrong with me. And yet, there are so many people at every level of poker who are so deeply unhappy. It leaves me wondering.
And perhaps that's what really is the most difficult challenge for this generation of poker players. To infiltrate a world that is at its root, deeply unhealthy and imbalanced...
The Griffin/Qureshi story does not involve poker at all. Sure, Griffin and Qureshi are both poker players. But it seems they are also, to use a phrase which gives them the benefit of the doubt, active high-stakes proposition bettors.
It's pretty clear that Haseeb's intent in the above quote is that there's something about the world of crazy prop bets or the overall baller lifestyle that's fundamentally unhealthy. But this world is not fundamentally related to poker.
Poker is a competitive strategy game, and many of its players enjoy it solely on that basis. They make rational investment decisions with respect to their poker career, and the financial risk associated with the random elements of a poker game is merely an unavoidable cost of playing. These players will never play casino games, bet sports, or make impulsive prop bets. They are not "gamblers" in any meaningful sense of the word; they would be much better described as long-term investors.
I would suggest that the Griffin/Qureshi story is a gambling story and NOT a poker story. With all due respect to the personal experience Haseeb was willing to share, the conclusions he has drawn in the quote above are not conclusions about the world of poker players. They are conclusions about the tiny world of gamblers who happen to have made it to the top of the world of poker players.
Accordingly, I don't see this story as having any sort of implications for the poker community. I don't see why it should be either good or bad for poker. And, beyond the novelty value of it being a story about two poker players, I don't see why it should be carrying nearly as much content in poker-related publications as it has been.
Is prop betting part of poker culture?
I admit that, holed up in my ivory tower, I am likely quite out of touch with the "real-world" poker culture, centered upon the fascinating antics of our most successful players, and I would not be so silly as to suggest that the culture of a particular game is confined entirely to the game itself. If poker players as a group are actually characterized by not only playing poker, but also by making crazy prop bets, then indeed that is part of the poker culture.
However, I would dispute the idea that prop bets are indeed characteristic of poker players. Rather, they are characteristic of a certain subgroup of poker players: gamblers who play poker. And it just so happens that the highest-stakes, highest-profile poker players in our world are probably especially likely to be gamblers. I can think of three reasons why.
1) Self-selection of gamblers to the game of poker
We'll keep the math light today, and we'll make up most of the numbers, just for the sake of illustration.
Let's separate society into those who like to gamble and those who do not. Pulling a number out of thin air, let's say that 5% of society enjoys gambling, in the sense of perhaps house-edge casino games or of unique wagers on uncertain-probability sporting events/prop bets (but NOT "gambling" merely in the sense of playing competitive strategy games for money, which is distinctly different from each of these).
Now let's separate society into those who like to play poker and those who do not. Using the PPA's estimate of 55 million American poker players of various levels, we might guess that around 17% of society likes to play poker. Some portion of this 17% likes poker because it's a competitive strategy game, some portion likes poker because it's a fun way to gamble, and some portion likes it for a combination of those reasons.
What does the overlap between these two groups look like? It seems reasonable to expect that gamblers should be more likely to get into poker than non-gamblers, for a few reasons:
- Unlike most other competitive strategy games, poker is very popular to play for money at all levels of stakes. Therefore, if someone who is predisposed towards enjoying gambling is going to pick a strategy game to play, they are more likely to choose the one where they will easily find millions of opponents who are willing to play it for their desired level of stakes.
- Much of society perceives poker as a gambling activity. Regardless of whether or not this is meaningful or accurate, this should compel people who like gambling to try poker.
- Casinos strengthen this perception by offering poker alongside their degenerate house-edge games. Gamblers who frequent casinos are likely to try poker at some point.
The result is that about 14% of poker players are gamblers, versus 5% of the population as a whole. Therefore poker players as a group become more identified with gambling than other groups, despite the fact that no actual aspect of the game of poker has contributed to these effects.
Play with the numbers and the effects can be more drastic. If you take a broader view of "gambling" and let the percentage of gamblers exceed the percentage of poker players, the percentage of poker players that are also gamblers can get as high as you want.
2) Self-selection of gambling-predisposed poker players to higher-stakes play
We have seen in our analysis of the WSOP Main Event that high-stakes poker games demand either a high level of wealth or a high level of risk tolerance (or even risk-seeking-ness). Realistically, though, in the age of $100k-buyin tournaments and nosebleed cash games, the WSOP Main Event is pretty small. If we were to perform any sort of reasonable risk analysis on the highest-stakes games in the world, we'd find that tremendous levels of wealth are needed for a risk-averse individual to participate, and yet the general consensus is that very few players actually have a proper bankroll for these games.
Among rational players who aren't millionaires to begin with and who manage their poker career like a long-term, low-risk investment, few of them will ever be able to climb all the way up through the stakes and reach the highest-stakes games.
On the other hand, gamblers with the same skill sets as these rational players are likely to throw caution to the wind and move up too quickly, or impulsively play in stakes that are outright too high for them. Among this group, some of them will succeed and then maintain themselves at the higher stakes. Therefore, the highest-stakes games should have a significantly higher percentage of degenerate gamblers than the poker community as a whole.
3) The focus of media on interesting personalities
Finally, now that we've got our high-stakes players, the media will inevitably focus their attention on those players who produce the best stories. Gamblers (of various degrees) produce better stories than those who are more conservative with risk. Therefore we should expect an even higher percentage of the high-stakes players we hear about to have tendencies towards gambling than the high-stakes community as a whole.
All told, as we restrict our attention to the biggest poker players, we might expect as many as half of them to also be gamblers. Their gambling activity, which is at best tangential to the game of poker, will not be representative of the world of poker.
Conclusion: the REAL poker culture
The most talked-about members of the poker community are an extremely small sample of the entire poker community, and we should expect this sample to also be strongly biased in favor of people who are predisposed to degenerate gambling. The vast majority of the members of the world of poker would never dream of ever making a wager as ridiculous as that of Griffin and Qureshi. Even among successful, competitive, professional poker players, I expect that few of them share the view of poker culture that these prop bettors have.
Since this behavior is not characteristic of the vast majority of poker players, and since the behavior is completely unrelated to the game of poker (but probably related to a self-selecting subgroup of poker players), the culture of these crazy prop bets is a separate culture from that of poker.
Stories such as these should be neither good nor bad for poker. Suggesting that stories such as these are somehow inherent to or representative of poker, however, is almost certainly bad for poker, as well as incorrect.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
