When I was a young man, before I could legally go to a bar or vote, I played chess for money and glory. Not much money or glory, mind you, as my abilities seemed to plateau at a level far below my early-adolescent dream of becoming the next Bobby Fischer. But I would on the occasional weekend pony up from my meagre paper-delivery earnings a $25 or $50 entry fee and play in a chess tournament against adults and other nerdy kids. These entry fees funded a prize pool for the winners. On a few occasions, I actually won some of this prize money, when there were age group prizes or prizes for non-expert rated players.<\/p>\n
My youthful enthusiasm for chess eventually faded (though I still enjoy the occasional pick-up game), but in recent years I caught the poker bug and became part of the fad inspired by amateur Chris Moneymaker’s win at the World Series of Poker several years back. Though I slowly lost a total of about $1000 during the first year I played poker, I eventually caught on and have won a whole lot more than I’ve lost since then. I have to assume that experience and acquired skill had a lot to do with this change in fortune.<\/p>\n
This article<\/a> explains why poker is not gambling, any more than chess is gambling. It makes as much sense for poker to be illegal as it would be to make chess tournaments with entry fees and prize money illegal. Not that gambling, which is stupid, should be illegal either. Vices are not crimes<\/a>.<\/p>\n What amazes me about the debate over whether poker should be legalized is the openness with which the purported negative effect on established state-sanctioned gambling concerns is treated as a legitimate consideration (as it appears to be in the linked article). Have these people no shame? It’s bad enough that the government and its supporters think it has the moral authority to protect people from themselves, <\/em>but its belief that it has the authority to protect particular businesses from the free preferences and choices of consumers is criminally insane.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When I was a young man, before I could legally go to a bar or vote, I played chess for money and glory. Not much money or glory, mind you, as my abilities seemed to plateau at a level far below my early-adolescent dream of becoming the next Bobby Fischer. But I would on the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-83","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=83"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":89,"href":"https:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83\/revisions\/89"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=83"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=83"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=83"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}