Gambling is one of my passions. I love poker, betting on sports, and most other forms of risking money to win (or lose). There is a rush associated with placing a bet and hitting that bet, where for once you called it right and were rewarded for it. Call me a degenerate if you want — I embrace the term, as do many of my friends who feel the same way about gambling.
The thing that I absolutely hate, however, is America’s love-hate relationship with it. In many states gambling is perfectly legal, yet if you are in certain professions you can get in trouble for it. Take baseball, for example. As a die-hard Yankees fan I often have to answer to people bemoaning the organization’s salary as well as history of excellence and that’s fine. I’m used to that. What really annoys me, though, is when players like Alex Rodriguez face possible suspensions due to playing in “illegal poker games.”
Is this really what our world is coming to?
I have been playing poker for the better part of seven or eight years. My poker resume includes an appearance in the 2006 World Series of Poker Main Event and several cashes in other local tournaments, so poker is definitely one of my passions and I hate seeing people being punished for sharing the same love of the game. The crackdown on poker by the United States government is utter and complete nonsense, with most online poker sites being forced to focus business elsewhere in the world. The few sites that still allow American players to play do so with the uncertainty that anything can change at any time.
My question is, simply, who cares if Alex Rodriguez plays in a home game? What bearing whatsoever does this have to do with the way he plays baseball? There have been speculations that certain games may have “turned violent” and that there may have been drugs used in proximity to the game, and if this is true then obviously this would constitute a problem with those specific games.
But the problem lies more with the fact that Major League Baseball as an organization is against gambling in general, and forbids its players to do so.
Everybody knows about Pete Rose’s ban from baseball due to gambling, and he never even threw a game in order to profit! As the Dowd Report points out, Rose bet on his own team to win. What is wrong with that? Obviously if he was throwing games it would be one thing, but it is a known fact that while you can lose on purpose, you can’t win on purpose. Some matchups may be lopsided due to offensive and defensive differences, that much is true, but the fact of the matter is that in order to win you must try… it is not something that can happen on purpose.
The same goes with poker. In fact, poker is less gambling and more about reading your opponent, much like baseball. In baseball, coaches will position players in certain places and read the situation being dictated by numerous factors including the count, the batter at the plate, and other individual pieces of information. Poker is similar in that you must read the situation and decide for yourself what the best course of action is.
It will be a difficult task to prove that Alex Rodriguez was ever actually at the poker games in question, and he will likely never suffer any consequences for it, but the issue remains — the Puritanical attitudes toward poker and gambling in certain parts of society need to stop.
At the end of the day, people should be able to do with their money what they please, as long as it doesn’t give them an unfair advantage. And no matter how you cut it, neither Alex Rodriguez nor Pete Rose ever had an unfair advantage by playing poker or betting on his own team to win.
Gerry Wachovsky is a graduate student and columnist for the Daily 49er.
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