Time for a bit of a rant.
I spend a lot of time discussing this, hearing about it and answering questions on it. Is poker a sport?
I guess it’s an arguable point. For my livelihood, hells yeah it is. It’s much easier to legitimize, regulate and promote a sport than it is to do the same for GAMBLING.
My opinion is this: poker is a game of skill. You do need to bet your money, but it is calculated. Poker is not the same type of GAMBLING that blackjack, roulette and slots are. Unless you are playing foolishly, you know the chances of outcomes, your odds and risks.
Poker certainly has some similarities to other sports: you need to practice; it’s covered on ESPN (heavily); skillful, well-practiced participants win more than lose; it has the potential to attract crowds, etc. This list goes on.
What it doesn’t have though is the level of physical exertion that real sports do. Now, I know some poker players who would argue that squaring off against the world’s best requires concentration to rival that of Nascar drivers, but let’s be honest here – you’re sitting. They don’t measure the 40-yard dash in poker. They don’t measure your vertical jump, rebounding skills or how hard you can hit a puck. Many say that a game like basketball is 10% ability, 90% brain-power. Well, poker is almost 100% brain-power.
Poker isn’t alone in this discussion, in my opinion. The same argument could be made about golf. I think it’s more of a game than a sport. Does that mean Tiger isn’t an athlete? No and no. Does he play a sport? That’s debatable. Keep in mind that John Daly plays the same game professionally as Tiger.
Especially in tournament poker, arguably the determiner for who is the best, there is an element of luck that doesn’t come into play with sports. Darvin Moon is the chip leader of the November Nine; far behind him is poker’s Tiger Woods, Phil Ivey. Moon owns a logging company and started playing Hold’em 3 years ago.
In a sport, you don’t make the finals after 3 seasons of semi-interest. In a game of skill (coupled with luck), that can happen.
A home game of poker is different than a pickup game of football and the Final Table of the World Series of Poker is different from the Super Bowl. That isn’t a detractor for either event, but it is a glaring difference.
Poker is an art. Poker takes dedication. Poker is a skillful game.
Poker is not a sport.
Hit the comments to let me know what you think.
I disagree. While the variance does compromise the skill to some extent, there are so many other forms of “variance” that exist in other sports, even though those forms might not include cards coming out of a deck.
Think about the offensive line for a professional football team. Each guy was almost trained in his craft at a different school and evaluated in a separate way based on the needs of his team. And the team arbitrarily decides a plan for how they’ll contribute to the team, even though that plan may not best showcase their actual SKILLS the way another plan would.
That’s one example. What about injuries ? Different-sized ballparks in baseball? How about a 9-7 team reaching the Super Bowl last year (I’m looking at you, Arizona).
I totally agree that tournaments aren’t the best showcase of skill, and maybe “sport” isn’t the best way to classify poker, but other sports have comparable illegitimacies to those found in our great card game.
JZ
You overlooked the obvious here. No one is taking steroids in poker so it must not be a sport.
(And ESPN covers the National Spelling Bee too, is that a sport?)
The game of chess is considered sport?
Like chess, poker is a sport of the mind, an art of handling opponents.
I think yes, poker is sport.
No one is taking steroids in poker so it must not be a sport.
People take performance enhancers in poker all the time. It’s just that all of them are legal.
I agree with everything you said except about golf. I’m not an avid golfer, but its fairly clear that the guys on top of the sport are in good physical shape, john daly is just an exce3ption to the rest of the tour, a guy who doesnt need to do jack to be able to hit a ball 350 yards straight consistently. The rest of the PGA is in general, a group of world class athletes.
‘sport’ has always been difficult to define, but the best definition i’ve heard (as in, i have yet to find a sport that doesnt meet the criteria) is;
‘A competitive activity that requires a physical skill’.
so by that definition, no poker isnt a sport