Casino Tycoon Sheldon Adelson: 'Poker Is Gambling'Billionaire Asked About State Gambling Laws And DFS |
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Billionaire casino boss Sheldon Adelson, who has long tried to get the federal government to ban online poker out of moralism, took another swipe at the card game in a recent interview with Yahoo Finance.
The 83-year-old said “poker is gambling” and challenged the widely-held notion that it is predominantly a game of skill. He said that skill does play a role, but he apparently sees that as negligible.
“They say poker is a game of skill,” Adelson said. “I don’t know how skill can apply to somebody shuffling a deck of cards and randomly giving them out to you. You don’t have any control over it. Can somebody bluff and can somebody place bets better than somebody else? Yes. But that doesn’t make poker a game of skill.”
Many will disagree with what Adelson said, as the quality of cards dealt breaks even over a large enough sample size. Poker is a game to be looked at in the long-run, not just a single session. If you look at hands one by one, it can be easy to see poker as fundamentally a game of luck.
Adelson gave those comments after being asked a question about daily fantasy sports contests and state gambling laws. Adelson also believes DFS is gambling.
Gambling law in many states encompasses both poker and DFS, so technically poker is gambling under the law, though some have tried to reclassify it in order to circumvent state gambling statutes. An effort like that was recently unsuccessful in Nebraska. A successful effort in Maryland to remove criminal penalties for hosting a home game involved distancing poker from gambling by framing it as social gaming. The law stipulated the game must be among players who “share a preexisting social relationship.”
Meanwhile, the classification of poker as gambling has led to poker game raids this year in states such as Arizona, South Carolina and Kansas.
Back in 2012, a federal court, reportedly for the first time ever, took a look at whether poker is a game of skill. The answer was a resounding “yes,” as testimony included the fact that someone can make a living from poker, unlike other casino games. An analysis of 415 million online poker hands concluded that, depending on the skill of the player, after even just a few poker sessions, skill can “predominate over the element of chance.”
Ironically, a major DFS operator earlier this year echoed Adelson by saying that poker is not a game of skill. The FanDuel executive said in an interview: “There is a lot of academic research on this, what’s the skill versus luck kind of spectrum. The reality is within poker, every time you shuffle the deck, it creates an element of luck that trumps it basically to being much more a chance-dominated game than a skill-dominated game.” FanDuel CFO Matt King added that DFS “is truly a game of skill.”
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