Pulitzer-Winning Columnist , George Will, Defends Poker

Pulitzer-Winning Columnist , George Will, Defends Poker

Tuesday, 18 August 2009

George Will, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Washington Post, the US capital’s best-selling newspaper, has taken his pen to paper in defence of poker. On Sunday he took the opportunity to speak out against the UIGEA and theorise that the bill was passed to block the competition from the state governments and their state-run lotteries.

“Chess involves logic; roulette involves probability theory. Poker involves logic, probability and something pertinent to military and diplomatic strategy – bluffing,” he wrote, defending poker as a skill game. Will looked at game theory and the work of game theory and strategic specialist John Von Neumann – that’s a badass scientist name if we ever heard one, and he did work on the Manhattan Project.


Howard Lederer, Full Tilt Poker co-owner and leading man in the Poker Players’ Alliance (PPA) also mirrors the chess-and-poker comparison;


“When you play chess, there is symmetry of information: Both players have all the information provided by the location of the pieces on the board, and both are equally ignorant of the opponent's intentions,” Lederer says. “A computer can be programmed to ‘play’ a powerful game of chess, but not of poker, wherein your opponents' cards are concealed.”




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