Bluffing is only a distraction for a busted hand.  If offered too often, eventually every play will be called and laid bare on the table.

Poker’s a game of bravado, rarely of chance, and not for the faint of heart.  It’s chess with chips for men who value respect and respect audacity more than money, and cannot be played in the dim glow of an LCD screen.

E-players, unable to play other players, play their pixelated cards, gambling on some ethereal algorithm to smile upon them.  But gambling ain’t poker.

Gambling is the merciless quest for fortune through another’s misfortune – usually the misfortune of the poor, who have nothing left to lose.  Even if a game is fair, there is no honor in the win.

In a perfectly fair game of chance, to ad-lib Adam Smith, the winner pockets everything tabled by the losers.   But any game outside of a home game is played against a house, which never loses.  And when the house is the State house, not only is the take raked, but winners are conned to take less, then taxed on what’s left.  A legalized game of chance is legalized theft.

The excuse for the state’s greed and plundering of the downtrodden is the education of their children.  So, with so much dough stuck to the State’s sticky mitts, why do elementary urchins roam the streets begging nickels and dimes from market shoppers to make up for shortfalls?

Games of chance are not wealth generators, they’re redistributors.  Like a sweeping rain which leaveth no food, the unwashed are lured into stealing from each other.  While the hustlers gets filthy rich.

If the ruling class cannot be neutral, they could at least not encourage detrimental behavior.  A Dollar and a Dream is the two-bit nightmare that unimaginable wealth can be had for nothing – no labor, no guilt, no consequences.  It’s worse than a tax on the poor… it’s Three-card Monte.

Gambling is the “Squirrel!” used by the State to distract the poor from their miserable state caused by the State.  The poor would be better off paddling a boat riding a rising tide; tallying the guaranteed wins of gainful employment, gaining respect and self-respect, while beautifying the economic neighborhood about them.  But to make that happen the State would have to do nothing – something it cannot do.