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Mypoody2 wrote:

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The point wasnt that the money Annie earned wasnt legitimate, it's that the people who play poker are trash. Which I tend to agree with. I think you have to be somewhat skuzzy to gamble your money and take someone else s over a game. Uh, and I doubt any remarks she made on the celebrity apprentice is going to hurt Joan's carreer... please...

That's just Victorian morality. It's ridiculous that in our society poker players can be thought of as scum, but not the hedge fund managers who are also gambling, taking someone else's money, and ruined the entire world economy in the process. Poker is a skill game with an element of chance.

Oh, and by the way, one of the great minds of the 20th century, John von Neumann, who invented game theory, was an architect of the atomic bomb, and was the father of modern computing (virtually all computers are Von Neumann computers) was a poker player. It was in von Neumann's game theory that John Nash (subject of the movie "A Beautiful Mind") made the advance (the Nash Equilibrium) that won him a Nobel.

The idea of game theory actually came to Von Neumann because of poker. At some point he realized that poker, unlike other games, had to have an optimal strategy that was flexible rather than based on simple probabilities. That idea intrigued him. Think about it: if you always bluff, you'll lose money. If you never bluff, you'll lose money. If you bluff a fixed percentage of the time regardless of the cards you hold, you'll lose money. Therefore, he wanted to develop a mathematical framework for analyzing game strategies. Game theory was born. And out of game theory came such diverse findings as The Prisoner's Dilemma (which led police depts to interrogate suspects separately) and the nuclear strategy of Mutual Assured Destruction (M.A.D.) that was the guiding doctrine of U.S./U.S.S.R. nuclear strategy during the Cold War.

All this from POKER. Because it was an interesting enough game to fascinate one of America's greatest minds.