The way to prove to him it's not gambling, would be to play him in 10 heads up games. You beat him 8 times, then offer to repeat the challenge. If it were really all gamble and no skill, he'd expect to come out 5/5?

Also, have a read of this - Is Poker Gambling?

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Or just deal pocket aces versus 89s ten times and see if the aces win everytime. I dont like it when people call AA preflop the nuts, how can you have the best 5 carded hand with 2 cards? The absolute nuts in my mind are those 5 cards that will win against every other 5 card combo possible. They may, but they probably won't: betting on uncertain outcomes = gambling.

There's a simple answer to that of course... it is a gambling game.

It is a skilled gambling game... but it's still gambling. If I sat down with Phil Helmuth tomorrow, there's a chance that I would beat him. If I played Gary Kasparov in chess, there is no chance.

Of course, any wagering game with any element of chance is gambling. Backgammon is not grouped with poker in common mind, but the games are very similar. They're skill games because the players control the chances. A skilled player makes wagers that he will win a favorable amount of the time, a poor player makes wagers that he will lose too often.

Your friend is a fool. Until the hand is decided, it's gambling. AA preflop is a GOOD gamble... but so are LOTS of other situations. Just because it's a good gamble doesn't mean it's not a gamble though... and just because it's a gamble doesn't mean that it doesn't take skill to choose between good situations and bad ones.

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-You may not know this, but poker is a game of incomplete information.

everytime you put money into the pot your gambling. but if your a good player, you would do it mostly when the odds are in your favour. it could be refered to as educated gambling. certain aspects of the game though make the game more skill based than a pure gambling game.
you have a tourney it seats 100 people and everyone is equally as good as each other. there are blinds but they never raise up through the levels. now because everyone is equally skilled at playing poker and everybody gets the same luck the players who will excel are the players who get the good luck first. now they will get ahead to start with, but sooner or later they may hit there bad luck and so loose chips. this happens to all the players and everyone would stay about even and the game might take forever! however, if you manage to double up through a bit of good fortune and your equally as good as every other player. and then you think of your extra chips as an advantage then there is something you can do to use this advantage and is as follows-

they are extra chips you can use to play hands you wouldn't normally work with. this increases your chances of winning the tourney. - the reasons as follows;
advantage management.
by spending your extra chips wisely you are able to improve the amount of chips you win due to the fact that you will see more flops and so win more hands, than a person who doesn't do this. - but its not that simple, this method wouldn't work for my example tourney above. Because Mike Caro says as one of his theories of poker that one player could play twice as many hands as another player and both would still end up approx even stacked. So how could this be an advantage? well that is due to the added factor of things such as the bluff and more importantly the read.
the bluff.
now lets take our tourney from before and add a new player into it. this player is just as skilled as every other play except he can bluff 10% better than the rest! now tell me who do you think will win? he has an advantage that cannot be put down to luck because it is his own ability or skill that is his winning formula! Once he is sat on a few chips he can loosen up the hands he is floping with and so play more hands and so have a larger opertunity to make well timed reads and bluffs. I mention reads because it is a skill i personally believe to be one of the most important tools in poker. the most sucessful bluffs come from good reads of play. So bluffing is a skill and is not determined by odds.
other factors which put skill into poker are listed below.

-ability to play a winning form of poker (dependant on players ability) *
knowing your odds and likelyhoods (dependant on players ability) *
-reading plays. the better you are at this, the more well timed bluffs, calls and folds you will make ahead of the lesser experienced player and so reducing the luck you would otherwise need to rely on.
* what i mean about players abililty is that because not everyone is equally as good at poker this gives the pros the advantage over the beginers and so eliminates the gambling aspect for the better player.

these are just a few ideas but answer my following question.

If you were to push your stack all-in everytime you had the odds in your favour how long would it take you to win the wsop?

based on the idea that poker is a game of gambling you'de never win!

so why have pros like doyle brunson, phil ivey, phil hellmuth dan harington etc been so consistant?

because their poker playing abilities are overall better than everyone elses!

It's obviously gambling, because there's no way to know what's going to happen. You can figure the odds, read your opponents, bluff.....and there is definitely a large amount of skill involved.

Educated gambling, or a similar term.

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"The way to prove to him it's not gambling, would be to play him in 10 heads up games. You beat him 8 times, then offer to repeat the challenge. If it were really all gamble and no skill, he'd expect to come out 5/5?"






not necassarily, i could flip a coin 100 times and mathematically its possible to never land on tails.

i dont understand why some people seem to be in denial about it but poker IS gambling.

Solarfx - I'm not denying it is gambling. Technically, under every definition I've ever read, it is.

What the OP's friend (and many of my friends) seems to think is that it's ENTIRELY gambling, like blackjack. I was trying to show that all these people would treat the game like they would treat tossing a coin, and they'd lose because of it. Poker is about the long run, and in the long run - better players will win. Smushing these naysayers into the ground with a good thrashing seems to me to be the best way to dispel the myth that poker is all gambool.

And yes, mathematically it's possible to toss heads or tails 100 times in a row, but it doesn't happen does it? Chaos gets its ugly head in the way.

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