Poker

Last week my friend Michael shared the following question and link:

Is Poker a sport? The Baltimore Sun's Rick Maese says no and explains why here.

Now the Sports Guy Bill Simmons give us his 2 cents:

See, everyone thinks they know how to play now. Before Mike McD broke onto the scene, Hold'em was an underground game, the forbidden door most gamblers were afraid to open. But repeated cable showings of "Rounders" inspired a new breed of casual players like myself to give the game a try. ESPN popularized the pocket cam and made the game easier to understand.

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If you enter a major chess tournament, no matter how much you'd practiced, you'd get wiped out. Same for the Golden Gloves, a PGA tournament, PBA, you name it. But everyone has a chance in the WSOP [World Series of Poker]. On the bright side, anyone can win. On the flip side, you can say the same about keno.

After detailing his departure from he WSOP, Simmons has this to say:

It's one thing to get outplayed. It's another to lose to a reckless idiot. But that's poker in the 21st century: You need to be lucky. Period. I know Mike McD disagrees, but only because he's trapped in a suddenly dated movie.

Anybody up for a game of keno?