Is poker a sport, or merely an aspiration? Answering seriously takes more than intuition: it means measuring Texas Hold’em against what, by definition, makes an activity a sport.
Sport rewards flawless execution, poker does not
Every sporting discipline rests on an implicit pact: if the athlete executes the technical gesture flawlessly the performance succeeds, if they make a mistake they hand the rival an advantage. Skill and result are welded together. In traditional Texas Hold’em poker this pact breaks. You can play a hand impeccably with no guarantee of victory, or make a mistake without paying for it and, at times, even be rewarded. This is the first obstacle any comparison between poker and sport must face, and the reason the topic has always divided insiders.
The five realities of poker, according to Taylor and Hilger
This nature is so deep-rooted that professionals have adopted it as a mantra. Ian Taylor and Matthew Hilger, in their bestseller Poker Mindset (2007), sum it up in what they call “the five realities of poker”: poker is a game of both skill and luck; in the short term luck is queen; in the long term skill is queen; it is a game of small edges; and it is a game with a very high variance factor.
The authors insist on one point: only by accepting these five realities can a player regulate their mindset and steer it toward the quality of decisions rather than the single result. It should be noted, however, that these are realities framed through purely probabilistic, long-term lenses — the same quantitative perspective that, on its own, is not enough to make poker a sport, yet honestly describes its mental component. In other words, for Taylor and Hilger the difference between an amateur and a professional lies not in the outcome of a single hand, but in the ability to accept variance and to judge oneself on the quality of the decisions made across the whole competition.
What defines a sport
To move beyond impressions we need a definition. According to the European Sports Charter, taken up by CONI in 1992, sport is any activity whose aim is to improve physical and psychic condition, to develop social relations, or to obtain results in competitions of any level. These are three alternative, non-cumulative criteria: meeting even one of them is enough to fall within the definition. Seen from this perspective, the case is far more favourable than common sense suggests, and it deserves to be examined criterion by criterion rather than dismissed from the outset. The question then becomes concrete and testable: which of these criteria does Texas Hold’em poker actually meet?
Psychic condition: poker as empowerment
The first criterion poker meets is that of psychic condition. The professional player’s cognitive activity is expressed in what Bruscaglioni (1994) calls empowerment: a process that activates and facilitates change, helping the person out of a stalemate, and which may be individual (self-empowerment) or involve an entire group. It is an improvement of mental faculties entirely akin to that required by cognitive-level sporting activities. On this front, the minimum requirement of improving psychic condition is fully met.
The competition criterion: why the tournament matters
The most discriminating criterion, though, is that of results in competitions of any level, and here the structure of the game becomes decisive. In cash game there is no defined end: the session has no set finish and, aided by the aleatory component of its original structure, it cannot guarantee a competitive result. In cash game, moreover, there are no rising blind levels and the compulsory bets stay fixed indefinitely: every interruption is merely the interval of a long session, not the finish line of a contest. The tournament format overturns the situation. By its very nature it is an elimination sporting competition: it has a beginning, a progression and, inevitably, a winner. It is the tournament format, not cash game, that answers the competition criterion — so much so that, in the thesis’s analysis, that very criterion becomes the reference paradigm for the study of the skill indices.
From lawfulness to sporting recognition
One last step remains, a legal one. As Crismani (2008) recalls, the recognition of a discipline follows the establishment of its lawfulness; and the same author admits that, from this perspective, there would be no reason not to recognise the Texas Hold’em poker tournament as a sporting discipline. Poker, in short, already possesses most of the requirements of a sport. Recognition, from this standpoint, would not require distorting the game, but only closing the last gap: an objective criterion that makes its skills truly decisive. This is the task taken on by the Skill Poker Index take on.
In the next article we will see how that criterion is born: the new interdisciplinary approach on which the Skill Poker Index are founded.
