Turn on the TV nowadays, and one cannot help but find some form of poker on ESPN or some other sports program. But is poker really a sport? Shouldn't that be on a different channel?
Proponents of poker's "sportism" claim that the physical and mental strain required to endure a long tournament and deal with stressful situations are synominous to the strain endured in other sports. They say that the participants train just like any other sport, and no on e can argue that the great poker players don't receive the kind of money that any other sport has come to accept. The strategy involved with knowing whether or not to call a bluff mirrors the strategy used by coaches in other sports. The participants are entitled players, not members or entries, but are they really "athletes"?
A friend of mine describes a sport as, "something you can pull a hamstring doing,". No one expects a poker player to do any such thing, with most of the action occuring with each player remaining comfortably in their seat, or maybe standing briefly to stretch. Poker success also does not require any athletic ability, or what is generally accepted as athletic ability, as was proven by 2005 World Series of Poker (notice the sports tie to baseball) and grossly overweight Greg Raimer.
So, what makes sport a sport? Is it physical fitness and ability, or is talent and mental strain? Either way, it looks like Poker is here to stay.
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3 comments:
if poker is a sport, so is UNO
One of the members of the philosophy department invited me to a poker game, after which he asked whether I thought it was a sport. Without really thinking, I said "nup". My first argument would be that the response was unthinking and that what is and isn't sport is probably more about "intuition" than "definition" and my intuitions are as good (or bad) as the next persons.
There's obviously a link between poker and sports because they're both games, they're both "played" - but that means they share common conceptual "ancestors", not that they're the same thing.
More broadly, I think there's a difference between activities that require physical fitness (or for which physical fitness helps) and "physical activities" in the sporting sense... but we'll also look at this more with Gumbrecht and Caillois!
I agree with you that poker should not be a sport. In my high school the issue of something being a sport or not was most clearly seen in marching band. There were stron proponents of marching band being a sport. In fact, our high school gave marching band members varsity letters, exemption from gym and even school credit (no other athletes received school credit). While it is true that marching band is physcially straining that does not make it a sport. I read an article criticizing marching band as a sport and how it would be similar to someone going around collecting rocks with their rock collecting buddies since both are physcial and are team-oriented. Marching band may be more like a sport than poker is, but that doesn't mean that it is a sport.
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