8/20/2010--Is Poker Immoral? #2

This was in response to a 2+2 post, which suggested that either Christianity or the Bible taught that poker, as a form of gambling, is immoral:


I have read the Bible cover-to-cover three times, and I have read some portions many more times than that. I have taught Bible studies as well, for ages from middle school to adults.

IMO, you can paint anything that you don't like as coveting, greed, poor stewardship, or not "redeeming the time" (a biblical term that refers to wasting time that could better be used in spiritual pursuits). The usual refutation is simple enough, something like, "Well then, is watching a baseball game a sinful waste of time? Is spending money to see a game in person poor stewardship? If both of those are true, then is that not true of any type of recreation?

For the serious poker player, the discussion is different. The arguments are about things like greed, addiction, and coveting (though I'm not quite sure how coverting got in this discussion, as I don't believe it applies at all). Again, let's compare poker to other secular pursuits.

If I decide I want to become a SNE* and grind 60 hours a week and make piles of money, is that greed? If so, how it is worse than having no life for 10 years so I can do nothing but work and study to become a brain surgeon and make piles of money? Is that surgeon-to-be not every bit as greedy as the SNE poker player? Greed is about what's in your heart, not about how you spend your time. I started playing poker to take care of my family when other options were closed to me (car accident, employer closing, and too many other things to detail here).

Coveting? What am I coveting, money? Again, no moreso than the brain surgeon, or than Bill Gates, who dropped out of Harvard to write computer operating systems because he saw the future and wanted to cash in.

The only places that I know of where the Bible speaks to gambling is when it mentions "games of chance" or "casting lots". Poker is no more a game of chance than bridge or many other competitive card games. As for the addiction issue, I have to say that I do have a problem with casinos.

Until I started playing poker, I had never done anything that could be called gambling--no bingo, no lottery tickets, nothing.** I don't do prop bets or bad-beat jackpots. Once I started playing poker, I decided to find a casino and see what it was like.

I had a very hard time finding the poker room. The casino was really about one thing--slot machines. They dominated everything else that was going on in the building. The slot machines took up at least 100X more space than the poker room (which was really just a few tables in an open area).

Clearly, slot machines are games of chance. They involve no skill. Much of the money that goes into them comes, I'm sure, from people that are poor (the same people that buy most of the lottery tickets), people that are addicted, or stupid people. If you feed coins into one of those machines for more than a few minutes, you're either addicted, or stupid, or both.

Bottom line, I don't see any valid biblical reason to consider poker any more immoral than any other recreational activity, or than any other work activity. I actually ran this by my pastor, and after considerable discussion, he agreed that from a biblical perspective I was correct.

But it won't break my heart if we don't get the casino that is being proposed where I live. There are already places in town where I can play tournaments for buy-ins up to $100 (assuming I was bankrolled for that, which I am not).***

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*Supernova Elite, the highest VIP level on PokerStars. The value of reaching this level is around $160,000, over and above any money actually won at the tables.

**After I posted this on 2+2, I realized that it was not entirely correct. I played poker for money once, with my high school track team on the team bus on the way home from a competition (I won about $20). Also, I had my mother buy me a lottery ticket, as a collector's item, the first time my (US) state ran a lottery.

***Using my consolidated bankroll management formula, to play $100 tournaments I would need a bankroll of 150 buy-ins, or $15,000. There are players who would want 200 or more buy-ins to play at that level, but those are players that play MTTs almost exclusively. I play a lot of smaller tournaments as well, so my standard deviation, and therefore my mathematical variance and risk of ruin, are all much less than someone who only plays tournaments with very large fields.