I find interesting that no one (yet) in OP or in the comments has talked about my main complaint about playing Poker as a living: it's a zero sum game where you basically only take money from other people. It's not productive. For me, that in itself is as depressing as the grind. But it appears most players don't really care about this, maybe because life oftentimes is not fair and thus being productive is not seen as important as it ought to be? Idk but I find it an important question, culturally.
I have a friend who got into poker in the 90s. He did a lot of studying and practicing at home, then took a bus down to Atlantic City to try his luck, goal was to pay for a ticket back.
He ended up making a lot more money than that (more than he’d ever made in a paycheck up to that point!), but half of it was from a guy with more teeth out of his possession than in his possession. Most of his opponents were irrational addicts fighting personal demons.
In the end, he decided gambling wasn’t for him, never went back to Atlantic City.
Specifically, if you're fixing to earn serious money off playing poker, your job is to SEEK OUT irrational addicts fighting personal demons, and personify said demons. You're basically looking to find prey and eat them. The wounded will be less capable of running away from you.
You could lurk outside the door and hit them with a rock or stab them with a knife, but that would be illegal. Functionally you're playing a similar role. You're stalking prey, trying to find the weak and hurt them, possibly until they die, knowing there will be more.
I quite understand why people can get off on this, but I also understand why many healthy humans will be put off by it. It's playing up one aspect of humanity while totally stifling other aspects. Humans are also cooperative, but that's not going to make you money playing poker.
Author here. I agree. We call it bum-hunting and its part and parcel of the game. I stopped live games mainly because I found it depressing to win from a guy who is obviously drunk or has a gambling problem.
I could never do that. Heck, I'm basically more or less always with a foot in that cesspool, so to speak. I can'timagine the horror at the end of the ride where you're out of house/home and resources and your dopaminergic system's still all fucked.
Yes. Its as you describe it. One of my first coaches and probably the best MTT player in India (Danish Shaikh) quit poker for the exact same reason. He got so good at the game that he pitied the people he won money from. After a point, he just gave up on the game.
I honestly wish I could Capitalism better but I'm just so bad at seperating out from the fact that its zero-sum and nobodies truly profiting even if there is an uneven distribrution of "winners" and that I might do harm where it might not have otherwise existed, although I sense the naïvety by realizing someone else would literally take your spot. I feel like thesepros are no different than professional addicts as well.
If you don't count human entertainment and skill as a positive then it's not just poker you'll find depressing, but also almost all media, sport and games. It's an absolutely massive 'unproductive' chunk of the economy.
I've played in small poker tournaments where there was a buy in which went to charity and the prizes were provided by local businesses. That's positive sum.
Poker itself can be exciting and entertaining to watch, it is televised for entertainment, and has sponsors. In smaller contexts it's a social event that brings people together.
It has produced books, and culture and life lessons (I can't think of better training in outcome bias), it's synonymous with learning to control your emotions. You gotta know when to hold em...
While I think you make an interesting point, I don't think the situation is terribly different for poker than it is for most sports unless you don't count the massive amount of unpaid time and injuries that even losing competitors often put into it as a cost.
The point is that you end up focusing your energies (often intentionally, but always by the nature of simply playing a lot) on exploiting gambling addicts.
If you make films you aren’t targeting “film addicts” that go to the theater all day 7 days a week. They have a minimal effect on your outcome.
I would differentiate between entertainment and gambling. Sports and media get revenue from a massive audience of people who pay to watch it, and that revenue pays to promote solid talent within the field itself.
If playing sports required taking money from the losers to pay the winners, and the people who lost the most amount of money are those who end up having some kind of addiction and serious problem that the winners are exploiting, then yeah, sports would be also be quite morally questionable.
You are right that there is exploitation in sports and other forms of media, but I think most people can identify those aspects of sports and call them out.
Is this not also true for many sporting or competitive pursuits that are also effectively zero sum? For sports I suppose one could argue there are benefits to exercise and for other competitive games with professionals like chess there are mental benefits from getting good at them.
However, neither seem particularly "productive" outside of all the money that is funneled into events for marketing purposes. There is, of course, perhaps some inherent aesthetic and community building around a common interest that is valuable, but I'd argue that the same is true for poker - I personally find the game of no limit hold'em interesting from a theoretical perspective and have met a lot of people that I would not have otherwise through playing it.
Poker doesn't seem that much different to other abstracted competitive pursuits to me besides that it has a larger luck factor to it.
In non-tournament settings, every dollar you win at poker comes out of the pockets of another player at the table. It's truly a zero-sum game, as adding up the gains and losses of players at the table will result in zero.
In contrast, tournament games (chess, golf, tennis, WSOP, esports, etc) may have significant entry fees, but at a professional level the total winnings are significantly more than the sum of all entry fees. Generally the excess money comes from corporate sponsors or viewership fees. The entry fees can result in some players walking away with less money than they started, but I don't think this is common outside of tournament-play poker.
The most popular professional sports (soccer, football, baseball, etc) have players on salaries. Those players often also get performance bonuses, either for entire-team results (winning the championship) or personal results (number of games played, statistical thresholds, etc). But they're all getting paid _something_ win or lose.
For poker it's actually negative sum at most venues outside of private games due to the fees taken by the organizer (i.e. the rake). But yes, point taken that at least within the closed system of the game poker is zero/negative sum.
My comment was more directed at the OP's assertion that poker is not 'productive' because it is zero-sum. I personally don't see how injecting corporate sponsors into otherwise zero sum games (only one team in sporting events can win, only one chess player can win the tournament) elevates competitive pursuits outside of poker to what can be considered 'productive'. OP's view could be that all of these pursuits are equally unproductive and that would be fair enough.
In order to make money at sports you have to entertain others, i.e. produce entertainment for lots of people. Theoretically, you could win at poker without producing anything, but practically, the most profitable players will be the ones who at least produce entertainment for the people they play with...
I meant zero sum in the closed loop of the game itself. Only one team can win, the reason why they are paid so much is because they have built an audience and the sponsors/teams are effectively built around advertising revenue and/or sales of merch.
Agreed on the distribution of who wins and who loses, most people don't lose money playing basketball. However, the point I am trying to make is writing off poker as "not productive" simply because it is monetarily zero sum (or negative sum in the case of raked games) is a disservice to the game itself.
Look down on? I think gambling is harmful. That's quite independent on whether I "look down on" it or not.
I do suspect that poker can't be as inherently fun as most other card and board games of chance and skill, because if it was it shouldn't need high stakes to be exciting. But that's just a suspicion.
I have a philosophy of life, that I'd like to explain. Picture there's an immigrant. He comes from some far-off country with a very different culture. He didn't move by choice, he doesn't much like the culture of the county he came to. He'd like to protect his culture and raise his kids in it. He doesn't let them mingle, or get too involved in the culture around them.
Naturally, he fails. Looking back on it as an old man, he realises that his kids have adopted not only the worst attributes of the surrounding culture, but they have kept the least sympathetic sides of the old culture, his culture too. And they're repeating his mistakes. "I should have let go", he laments. "I should have picked the things that actually matter, and asked them to hold on to just those, rather than trying to keep everything the way I was used to."
I've told it as a story about immigration, because then it's quite easy to believe, right? But truth is, even if we never move to another country, we move to the future. Culture changes. We are that immigrant dad. We too, if we just try to hold on to what we're familiar with, will lose. We need to make conscious choices about what really matters, what's worth holding onto, and what we can let go. If we just coast along without thinking, we'll keep bad traditions and make new bad traditions too.
Gambling culture is one of those things I want to let go. Become a thing of the past. Recycled into something better. I do love modern board and card games, which manage to be fun without high stakes, smoky rooms and martinis. It's not that I don't understand the glamourous appeal of of all that, I am your "countryman" in that regard. It's just not what I want to save.
The vast majority of people who play poker do not play it for the "high stakes, smoky rooms, and martinis". Speaking for myself, I regularly play for very low stakes with friends in my own place of residence and we enjoy it as both as an intellectual pursuit and something to socialize over.
Obviously your viewpoint is perfectly valid - there are plenty of people who have been irreparably harmed by gambling culture and the way that poker is marketed largely does itself no favors in that regard. My point is that degenerate culture and poker can be separated and there are absolutely healthy ways to enjoy a hobby which, yes, has a luck element to it, but also requires precise study and meticulous decision making to excel at.
From what I've read I think you are conflating the predatory nature of casinos with the game of poker. Those two things are certainly linked, but I would argue that it would be a mistake to write off a game like No Limit Texas Hold'em as irredeemably harmful due to the association.
Are you sure about that? If it was just for the intellectual pursuit and socialization, why are you playing poker and not, say, Catan?
Obviously not everyone plays poker in a smoky room with gangsters, or even with real money, but I think maybe that cultural context is part of the explanation. You absolutely can divorce it from that cultural context, if you like poker but hate gambling - but is that worth holding onto, when there are so many options to get similar intellectual and social pleasures?
Why does anyone choose to play any game instead of another? Catan has a chance element to it, isn't that gambling to try to win the game? Why not play something completely deterministic? For the record, we also do play Catan and other games.
We play poker because we enjoy the structure of the game and it is different to other things. Personally I'm uncomfortable with your insinuation that I, and the friends I play with, are somehow culturally brainwashed to be gamblers because we enjoy poker.
I'll end the conversation by repeating what I said above. If you look down on this type of activity then there's nothing I can do to change your mind.
> Why does anyone choose to play any game instead of another?
Because of culture. But culture changes all the time - if we resist changing it, it gets changed for us, and then usually in ways we would least like.
> isn't that gambling to try to win the game
No, of course not. When I say gambling I'm talking about out-of-game stakes. There's obviously a difference between real-world money and in-game stakes like victory points.
You're not brainwashed more than anyone is. Catan and poker are both part of our culture. But we lose culture all the time, whether we want to or not (the point of my story), so is it really worth it to hold on to the culture that is heavily about gambling?
As I also said: even though lots of poker buffs will resist that because they are into the gambling, you can divorce it from gambling for yourself and your game buddies if you're really determined to. It's your choice. But is that really a conscious choice, or are you just trying to hold on to it without thinking critically about why, like the immigrant dad in my story?
Poker has taught me so many things about life that I probably never would have learned otherwise. Yes, it’s gambling and there is a random element, but it’s a strategy game played in the currency of the world in which it is set. This has wide philosophical implications far beyond the poker table.
Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
>In the top 1% of basketball games and the top 1% of poker games, they are sponsored and no one loses money.
I don't know, I hear lots of sports fans complain about the money earned by athletes that one might think that the owners are only moments from bankruptcy because of those greedy players' salaries!
The gambling aspect is a pretty obvious difference! There's nothing - or well, little - stopping you from gambling high stakes at chess, or go, or scrabble or dominion. It's just that those games are fun without gambling. Even some games that used to be heavily about gambling, like backgammon, have mostly turned into straight recreational games. But no-gambling poker really hasn't caught on. My guess it's that it's casinos, and a certain casino-adjacent culture/aesthetic, that has kept poker alive as a gambling phenomenon in this day and age.
Should we let casinos shape our culture in this way?
Something like football or chess or Formula 1 is valuable in itself; there's a beauty and elegance in seeing the hard thing done well.
In poker even the thing you're celebrating is zero-sum. Could person A fool person B or could person B read them; that's not people collaborating to create something in the way that two tennis players beating out a long rally are, that's just A vs B. And so much of the game is simply random luck - does the right card fall or not - and that's what people want to see; you might say there's skill in the game and that might be true, but people don't watch poker for the chess moments where someone makes a brilliant move, they watch it for the moments when the right number comes out of the random box. The larger luck factor matters.
I enjoy chess and Formula 1 too! I think poker is broadly misunderstood to be a game of luck disguised as a game of skill when in reality it is very much a game of skill in the long run. The "long run" here being hundreds of thousands of hands.
There are absolutely brilliant plays in poker at its highest levels when a player finds an interesting line with a particular hand. I agree that most poker "highlights" are not of this variety, but instead highlight the gambley nature of the game, but that is not the whole story. To me, studying and understanding the dynamics of good poker strategy has the exact same beauty and elegance which you use to describe football / chess / Formula 1.
I'd fully agree that the way poker markets itself in many contexts definitely leans into the degenerate nature of it and does itself no favors. However, there is a very complex beautiful game of skill behind all of it.
I found this one [1] pretty interesting - finding a raise with top pair weak kicker is not intuitive. There is some solver work in this video which is probably overly technical for a casual observer, but will give a bit of flavor on how poker is studied at a high level.
In most sports money come from sponsorship. It's not a zero sum game but positive sum game where you compete for the value added (from the player's perspective)
Think of it as entertainment. What does the average professional athlete really add to the world? Poker advances your understanding of probability and statistics, bet sizing, drawdown management, and many other skills that would be useful in the real world. Watching baseball on TV, not sure what you take away from that. Playing sports build health and community and that is a huge benefit in itself, but for some reason poker gets all the negative stigma and little of the benefit in perception.
For me, the reason is simple: gambling. The vast majority of people who gamble lose. That's it. Once you see that truth, the whole industry looks horrible. In the last 30 years, gambling has invaded so many communities in the United States for a very much negative effect. It is a tragedy. And, the more normalised gambling becomes, the more addicts it will product.
I think this is a rabbit hole that makes you want to pull out of it real fast. For instance consider how many tech jobs right now basically devolve into trying to make people see ads that they don't want to watch. Not only are you not adding value to the world, you're actively making it worse.
Of course people can convince themselves with all sorts of rationalizations, like claiming you're introducing people to things that can make their lives better that they might not have otherwise known about. But that's just a fallacy. Good things, with or without advertising, gradually become known. Online ads are overwhelmingly about shoveling chaff down people's throats.
And poker players have the same sort of rationalizations. You might view oneself as an athlete, or an entertainer, a competitor, or maybe even just an analyst. Many of those descriptors, in my opinion, fall closer to reality than ad delivery rationalizations, but again it's all just rationalizations anyway you look at it.
The number of people working truly valuable jobs that genuinely improve society are few and far between, and they tend to pay terribly. Farmers being a textbook example. There are some good counter-examples like doctors, but even there there's an undesirable trend. Working at a poor public emergency institution is going to drive relatively low income and high stress. Go work as a plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills and you're driving an extremely high income and low stress work. All in all we have a pretty terrible system, but nonetheless it's almost certainly better than all the others.
> I think this is a rabbit hole that makes you want to pull out of it real fast. For instance consider how many tech jobs right now basically devolve into trying to make people see ads that they don't want to watch. Not only are you not adding value to the world, you're actively making it worse.
I don't see this as the same thing at all. Advertisers exist because of demand for them by companies who want to sell their stuff to consumers. Those companies employ people and actually produce things that consumers want. This is not a zero sum game.
Ultimately all we really need is food, water and to keep from freezing to death in some shelter. So sure, we can get rid of almost everything else, but that isn't really the point.
By the same logic casinos, gamblers, and professional players all exist because there's demand from other players to play. If there were no 'fish' then there'd be no 'pros.' It's just all rationalizations. Look at the impact on society. Professional gamblers (or casinos for that matter) aren't truly making society better for anybody except themselves. It's the same thing for companies spending inordinate amount of efforts trying to force people to watch ads they don't want to see. That's not a benefit for society in any way, shape, or fashion.
During the genocide of Jewish people in Poland, one of the officers of the German reserve police who were tasked with the executions negotiated with his comrades that he would kill the children, but that he would only do so after their mothers had already been killed by someone else. This way, he told himself, he was doing the children a favor by ending their suffering because surely they had nothing left to live for if they had seen their mothers die in front of their own eyes.
I'm not saying poker (or advertising) is like the Holocaust. I am however saying people are exceptionally good at rationalizing their participation in acts they would otherwise find morally appalling if they end up in a place where they are part of a system and their ability to maintain their social status quo hinges on continuing to be part of it.
> All in all we have a pretty terrible system, but nonetheless it's almost certainly better than all the others.
Completely unrelated fun fact: Eastern Block apparatchiks used to refer to anarchists and other communists as "utopians" and coined the term "real socialism" (or "actually existing socialism") to describe the Soviet system of authoritarian governance and justify why it never met the aspirational goals Lenin and the Bolsheviks initially claimed they had. It's terrible, da, but it's better than capitalism and only a counter-revolutionary would claim that something more radical would be possible.
If you go back to the days of feudalism I'm sure you can find a thinker arguing in not as many words that while the divine hierarchy may feel cruel at times it is clearly preferable to the chaos of mob rule.
Spend any time working in advertising and you'll fall down the "content marketing" rabbit hole. There's a lot of money in selling Pepsi its own logo or making sure people can't forget about a brand but there's even more money in content marketing and that's entirely a grift.
Content marketing is like a void onion. It's layers upon layers of nothing and it all generates "passive income". Most of it exists to sell to other people who are doing content marketing as a get-rich-quick-scheme. Why bother doing a grift yourself if you can grift by selling your grift to other people and let them worry about how to make it actually work. The actual product and topic doesn't even matter. Is it investment advice? Mental health? Self-improvement? Weight loss? "Passive income"? Offer vacuous goodies like "free ebooks" to get people hooked and then continue selling and upselling them on the promise that if they just pay for one more Mastermind session, webinar, virtual retreat or coaching package, they'll figure it out eventually.
Yeah, and I think it's also an indictment of poker as a game. It's exciting? So would most games be, if played for high stakes! It can't be a very fun game in itself, if it needs stakes to be fun.
There are so many games out there. If it's really about the satisfaction of getting better, the social aspect, and all those other things, why not pursue it in one of the other games?
It's fun even for imaginary stakes, so long as they're limited. The reason you need stakes is not for the adrenaline, but because the stakes work kind of like 'life' in a video game. If you had infinite life the game would be stupid, because you could just rambo through everything. Same thing in poker. You could just go all-in every hand, because why not?
This is why some people like things like sit-n-go's or tournaments, where you pay a fixed sum once and then get a good amount of play in but where people will still take it very seriously.
Poker is hugely fun in and of itself to most people, the amount of imperfect information, dealing with human nature, mental calculations under pressure. I love playing house games with my friends
That said poker for fun and poker to make a living are almost indistinguishable, to make serious money multi-table grinds for 8 to 10 hours a day and the reasons outlined by OP article
I used to have a lot of fun playing poker for pennies, started in high school (we literally saved up pennies to play with during breaks), later online once that became a thing. The only requirement was that some stake existed, without any, it was a different game
Author here. Yes, I did mention it in my post. It was actually a big reason I switched back to daily job inspite of making 10-15x for the 3years that I played. It was very good money but depressing af. More over, once you are financially secure ($1m is enough money to retire in India), it makes no sense to put yourself through it further.
Years and years later I still have a fond memory of wiping a guy out for 5k in a 2-5nl game at Caesar’s during wsop.
He was a fellow low level pro that had been bluffing me all night, making nice and chit chatting with me.
Like thinking back now there is just zero remorse. Never saw him again. He didn’t have bus fare.
It is a sanctioned place to have a battle of wits for money. Totally agree it is not good for the soul to grind it out at the tables long term, but for me it was all about the thrill of devastation, giving and taking. Very much not the case that I “didn’t care”.
I met a great friend for a weekend traveling through Thailand after taking him for 10k online and noticing we were in the same country.
I lost 20k in an online hand all in on the flop to a runner runner. I look back on that as a thrill, the most memorable of roller coasters.
I'm not a poker player but I worked at a small casino. We had training sessions;new dealers, surveillance staff training, security staff training, supervisor training, cage training and I as a slot tech sat in as a filler customer. It was obvious after many hands the only winner is the non-loser as silly as that sounds. The one who sucks the least wins. Even with two players who always did really well if they were the last two it was basically whichever made a mistake is who lost. A bit like chess checkmate you never really stomp on the queen it's obvious to both it's over.
Many competitive games/sports where you are trading ELO or rankings (chess, RTS, boxing) are like this, but I wouldn't judge it outright as "not productive."
I'd reckon it's more about the journey, the stories and friends we made along the way, even though there may be few.
Whenever someone asks, "Why do they do that?" I always share the man who holds the Guinness World Records for rolling an orange with their nose: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66xwQZuic3E
I find it hard to understand how you could argue it's productive when it is literally about exploiting other people's inexperience, naivety or honesty (lacking a "poker face") in order to take their money from them. It doesn't produce anything. At best you could argue it's a form of entertainment but it's not even good at that except as an observer sport.
Gambling, for most people, is ultimately a form of fraud. It's built on the narrative that you can get rich quick. Gambling is for the winners. The losers are just paying for it. The narrative hinges entirely on numbing the mark's rationality and making them not think about the odds, getting them to keep throwing money at you until they go bankrupt.
Rolling an orange on the other hand is something you can do entirely by yourself without harming anyone except the people you inconvenience if you do it somewhere public. Neither activity is productive but at least rolling an orange with your nose isn't actively anti-social unless you're a dick about it.
Poker is one of America's favorite past time and many losing players enjoy the act of going to a cardroom and playing with others. We've often bemonaed the lack of "third places" like churches and the ensuing rise of loneliness, and cardrooms can serve as one of these third places.
I find it interesting that professional poker players are frequently criticized for this but I've never seen someone criticize a casino dealer or other employee for this.
This is like saying you lose on lottery because the state always wins in total. Money wise yes but when you have a lottery ticket you entertain yourself with hopes and can dream about what you'd do with the megabucks. If you feel good for a while because of it ... did you really lose?
Same with poker. Sure, you can only win if someone else loses but what if they had fun?
In other words, is going to the cinema a net loss?
I play poker because it’s fun. I’m decent, I have won a few 100+ NL tournaments in Vegas and finish in the money as often as not. But I’m gambling well within my means, which is different for everyone. I have no idea if I take $1000 from someone if that’s their rent for the month or if it’s budgeted for entertainment.
Gambling is ancient and wired deep in the human psyche. It’s neither morally right nor morally wrong. It is just something we enjoy as a species. I feel bad for people addicted, but I also feel bad for people addicted to alcohol or addicted to reading the news. Everyone needs to moderate their own consumption.
People who get addicted to the news don’t tend to lose their houses as a result.
Historically most societies have restricted gambling to one extent or the other because it’s clear that there is a subset of the population who can’t self moderate, and this results in a significant cost to everyone else.
We’re currently in a period of loosening regulations and we’ll see how that goes. Early results aren’t great.
We let people put their houses up as collateral in order to get a small business loan to start a restaurant. Statistically speaking those restaurants will be losers 80% of the time. They would be better off playing roulette and putting their house on black
1. The majority of restaurants fail for reasons that a lender will spot in the loan application process. Inexperience, location, undercapitalization, etc... The rate of failure for a restaurateur that manages to secure a loan is nowhere near 80%.
2. If a person with a gambling problem takes out a home equity loan and bets it all on black and wins, the most likely outcome is that they then keep betting until they eventually lose. So while one bet may have close to a 50% change of paying off, the real world expected value of giving someone $100k to go to a casino is much less than if you'd given that same $100k to a random person who wants to start a restaurant.
3. Opening a failed restaurant isn't something that someone is likely to do more than once. It's hard to find exact numbers, but the number of people who will ever start a failed restaurant is less than a tenth of a percent. The number of people who will experience a gambling disorder at some point in their life is 1-2%.
4. Even assuming a person does have some kind of problem and wants to keep trying and failing to open restaurants, the process of opening a restaurant takes a lot more time and effort than betting on roulette.
I wasn’t literally saying they should gamble their house rather than start a restaurant. My point is that we let people make all sorts of terrible financial decisions. Letting the government start to decide which decisions are worse than others, and ban them, is a slippery slope.
You don’t have imagine a slippery slope. Collectively we’ve been doing it for most of our history.
A significant portion of the the laws and regulations on the books today are “letting the government decide which financial decisions are worse than others.”
Gambling has in most societies throughout history been recognized as particularly pernicious. Early data from our recent experiments with loosening regulations seems to provide evidence that gambling produces significant externalities that need to be dealt with through some non-market means.
It’s not front and center, and frequently overlooked.
I do have some issues spending so much time on a zero-sum game, as you mentioned, but ultimately it’s better that I have the money than people who are going to gamble it away; I’ll do something useful with it, and they probably won’t.
"As Canada Bill Jones said, 'it's immoral to let a sucker keep his money.'"
Presumably why people view Poker different is, instead of trying to beat the Casino (Black Jack, etc), with Poker you're trying to beat another person.
But regardless of it being the casino or another person, it's still a zero-sum game.
The poker player is providing entertainment for others.
It's really not much different than working on a company backed by a rich investor where the CEO skillfully plays their cards to maneuver more money out of the rich fish while the other players also try to get what they can out of them.
> The poker player is providing entertainment for others.
Yes, and the top earners in poker aren't always the best players, but rather skilled players who have some personality instead of putting on headphones and grinding and get invited to lucrative private games.
Entertainment is much better for recreational players without pro players in the game maybe with the exception of occasional tournament celebrity. Pro poker player doesn't provide anything to anyone with the exception of a challenge to other pro players.
Same can be said of trading (unlike investing, where you hope your money will help build something). When you buy and sell stocks for a profit, it is because someone has a loss (or will have at some point).
