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Comment by quickthrowman | Hacker News Reader

> If Poker was a good competitive game, there would be an ELO system and people would play because they care about their skill ranking more than they care about gambling.

There is an ELO system of sorts, it’s the size of your bankroll. If you are a skilled poker player, you should win more than you lose.

Tournament poker is different than cash games, there’s a limited pool of chips and the goal is to win them all.

> Poker is an economic scheme where the House and the Sharks work together to lure people with real jobs into unfair competition / gambling with bad odds.

Agreed, it’s Wall Street in the form of a table game.

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Any game could incorporate wagers into its rounds. You could bet on plays in a football game. You could bet on matches in Chess. However, the competitive foundation isn't predicated on these wagers. This allows for more dimensions of skill variation because game participants can take risks that won't kill them.

In Poker, especially in tournaments but over time in cash games as well, there will necessarily be more losers than winners. That's a fine outcome for a competitive environment, and a terrible outcome for an economic one. And because placement is based on willingness to play at certain stakes instead of skill rating, the entire system is designed to mismatch the skill of the participants over the long term.

Betting on probabilities is an entertaining way to adjust levels of confidence to reality. I just don't really like the idea of promoting gambling to children.

Betting on matches of chess is much different. In poker you have a betting round after every move, the betting size matters and the betting is one of the main sources of information you get. In chess even if you bet after every move the amount wouldn't matter and you get little to no extra information from the bet.

Take all the pieces off the board and now the bets align with the information asymmetry. The only thing exclusive to poker is the hierarchy of the combinations of cards.

(nitpick: it's "Elo", not "ELO", it's a name not an acronym)

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