Look, I know poker has become increasingly popular to play and to watch over the last few years. It is trendy to the point that it takes over ESPN for one month each year under the premise that because it is competition, it is sport. B.S. I say. This should not be on ESPN, and while I'm at it, I want bowling, darts, and pool removed from ESPNs programming. These are a different form of competition that are not sport, and as such, need a different channel. Even if ESPN created another channel dedicated to competitive things you can do drunk, that would be acceptable. Regardless, here is part of the case against poker being a sport.
- Athletic ability is irrelevant. The majority of players in any sport should be athletic enough to participate in another sport. Even those mammoth offensive/defensive linemen in the NFL could at least do boxing or UFC type stuff, not to mention their ability to do World’s Strongest Man competitions (which do count as a sport). If you can find me more than a dozen seasoned “professional” poker players that could participate on the professional level in any other sport, I may consider relenting this argument. Until then, this is the biggest argument against poker being a sport. It should be noted that golf is the grey area. Athletic ability helps, but is not required to be good (i.e. John Daly or any other golfer over the age of 40).
- Too much luck, not enough skill/preparation required. Anything that you can play better in/at and still lose to a random person in a seat, purely by chance, is not a true sport. Sport is about competing and having the better player/team becoming victorious. I’m not saying there isn’t some chance or luck involved, but they usually aren’t one of the top 3 criteria that will lead you to a win. Winning a poker tournament requires so much luck that it removes any semblance to a true competition. That’s my bottom line.
- I can play poker while hammered, and win. That was a pretty explanatory sentence. If you can be successful at something while drinking/smoking, it is not a sport. Unfortunately this is another reason golf is a grey area, along with slow pitch softball and volleyball.
- It can be played in somebody’s garage at 3 in the morning. This reason draws a lot of parallels between poker and video games. Seriously, they are competition, they test the skills of another “competitor”, etc…. Still, they both involve you sitting in a chair and playing a game. If poker is a sport, then so are video games, and I cannot live with that hanging over our civilization.
- No reflexes or hand-eye-coordination are required. This is something that even video games require. Seriously, I won’t let this happen on my watch. Also, what is the difference between this and any other card game (pitch, spades, dueling solitaire) other than it is played for money. Clue me in on the disparity, please.
- No payback for lipping off. Baseball has the high-and-inside brush back pitch. Football has receivers coming across the middle and late hits. Basketball has intentional fouls eight feet in the air. Hockey, well, hockey has actual fights. Poker is full of mouth SOBs getting cocky because they hit a lucky-ass river card and took a good chunk of someone’s stack. Congratulations, you got lucky, now act like it was intentional. Unfortunately for poker, there is no way to punish these clowns other than to wait. Wait for it to happen to them, and then mock them until they cry. While it is cool to make another dude cry under the pressure of competition, to do so without violence (actual or attempted) does not carry the same weight as it does in actual sports.
- It’s one month season. . . . in Vegas no less, where so few professionals have placed in the top 10 in the last few years that it boggles the mind that they still make money “teaching” people their “secrets”. Could you ever imagine a major golf or tennis tournament in which only 2 of the top 25 players in the world made it into the final ten spots and still made loads of money just for showing up for the tournament? No, you can’t! What a joke. Not to mention, most of them don’t make their money by winning the tournaments, they make their money playing in back-room games and in advertising. I’m done with this crap of people calling poker a sport.
- The biggest reason is the most simple; in any other professional sport, you cannot learn to be a professional. Either you are blessed with the God-given ability and drive, or you aren’t. Poker is not like that. Don’t misunderstand, there are naturals at poker, but you can also grow into being a great poker player by learning those traits. You can’t learn to be 6’10” with a 42” vert and a smooth jumper, or 6’6” 280 pounds of muscle that can run the 40-yard dash in 4.7 seconds. Those are the types of things that differentiate a 6’3” slow white kid who can hit a jumper and Kevin Durant, or the big dude who is the wing-eating champion at your local BWs and, well, any offensive or defensive lineman in the NFL. You can’t learn to have that right combination of size, skill, and athleticism that professional sports require.
In summary, I can fully concede that poker encompasses some of the spirit of sports. It is a form of competition that requires loads of mental toughness, discipline, and concentration to be consistently good. That is why poker it isn’t a sport, luck trumps skill most of the time. It is a crapshoot between the lucky guy and the person who plays the best game in terms of focus and playing the odds. That’s it, and usually the lucky person wins. So let’s get this garbage off of ESPN so I can have one of my favorite networks back.
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