Silhouette of a Horse and Jockey
It seems that horse racing tracks in the USA are gearing up to jump onto the poker market if legislation make playing poker online and other venues legal.
Well that is a surprise, NOT!
Poker has always gone along with gambling, because poker need a pool of loose cash to make it worth while for the good players to earn a living. Grinding is a tiresome pursuit and the incentive to spend hours drawing out an opponent to induce bad play can be hard.
With horse racing people will bet on all sorts of possibilities with the only winners being bookies and those with inside information. Therefore tying up poker with horse racing will free up cash and give the liberation of mindless betting a chance.
Please do not look on these views as being cynical. It is just the business of capitalism in which you give people benefits for their capital. In this case horses running fast.
In Las Vegas it is the idea of living the Rat Pack lifestyle that draws people in with shows and bright blinging lights. In banking its the idea of making money off money. In the military industrial complex it is the idea of fear which drive people to buy weapons they do not need to fight people who have done nothing to them, leaving the ones that have done bad things to them to live the high life.
Poker is the purest form of capitalism and horse racing the original concept of crony capitalism.
It is a little known fact that Charles Babbage, the man who invented the concept of a computer, lost his money trying to use his analytical engine to work out the winners of Newmarket horse race. Charles Babbage and Lord Byron’s daughter Ada Lovelace tried to create a system which would provide every winner in all races, not thinking that the owners, trainers, bookmakers and jockeys would cheat and corrupt the races with devious tactics in order to make money. Humans not acting like pure mathematical formula therefore create a rigged market, hence crony capitalism! This was Charles Babbage’s downfall not realising that people talk and can be greedy, lazy, bad and wicked.
But poker which embraces all of the qualities which make horse racing dodgy is pure as long as there is no blatant cheating such as marked cards. But being greedy, lazy, bad and wicked is completely OK as long as the chips and cards are not manipulated and there are ways of making this completely straight.
With numerous people thinking that poker is a game of chance will mean that there will always be fodder for the better players to make a living.