Billionaire casino boss Sheldon Adelson, who has long tried to get the government to prohibit online poker out of moralism, took another swipe on the card game in a contemporary interview with Yahoo Finance.

The 83-year-old said “poker is gambling” and challenged the widely-held notion that it's predominantly a game of skill. He said that skill does play a role, but he apparently sees that as negligible.

“They say poker is a game of skill,” Adelson said. “I don’t understand how skill can apply to somebody shuffling a deck of cards and randomly giving them out to you. You don’t have any control over it could. somebody bluff and will somebody place bets better than someone else? Yes. But that doesn’t make poker a game of skill.”

Many will disagree with what Adelson said, because the quality of cards dealt breaks even over a big enough sample size. Poker is a game to be checked out within the long-run, not only a single session. For those who take a look at hands one by one, it may be easy to peer poker as fundamentally a game of luck.

Adelson gave those comments after being asked an issue about daily fantasy sports contests and state gambling laws. Adelson also believes DFS is gambling.

Gambling law in lots of states encompasses both poker and DFS, so technically poker is gambling under the law, though some have tried to reclassify it to be able to circumvent state gambling statutes. An effort like that was recently unsuccessful in Nebraska. A successful effort in Maryland to take away criminal penalties for hosting a house game involved distancing poker from gambling by framing it as social gaming. The law stipulated the sport have to be among players who “share a preexisting social relationship.”

Meanwhile, the classification of poker as gambling has ended in poker game raids this year in states corresponding to Arizona, South Carolina and Kansas.

Back in 2012, a federal court, reportedly for the primary time ever, took a glance at whether poker is a game of skill. The solution was a powerful “yes,” as testimony included the truth that someone could make a living from poker, unlike other casino games. An analysis of 415 million online poker hands concluded that, dependent on the skill of the player, after even only a few poker sessions, skill can “predominate over the portion of chance.”

Ironically, a huge DFS operator earlier this year echoed Adelson by saying that poker isn't a game of skill. The FanDuel executive said in an interview: “There is lots of educational research on this, what’s the skill versus luck roughly spectrum. The truth is within poker, each time you shuffle the deck, it creates a component of luck that trumps it basically to being a lot more a chance-dominated game than a skill-dominated game.” FanDuel CFO Matt King added that DFS “is truly a game of skill.”

Read More... [Source: CardPlayer Poker News]