There’s not a whole lot I can add to the eloquent post made by Sam Stone, so I will just close my interaction with you in this thread by saying:
You’re a complete dick.
And my apologies to the OP. I had no idea that my reply would lend itself to so complete of a trainwreck of your thread.
The poker players who yell at and berate the fish really honk me off. One asshole at the table can kill a profitable game if he’s obnoxious enough. I understand it can be difficult to maintain one’s composure after a bad beat, but if you can’t do it to a reasonable degree, you shouldn’t be at the table.
In online poker, there’s even less excuse for berating people. If you get sucked out on, you can scream at the monitor, pound your fist on your keyboard, or throw a can of lima beans at your lhasa apso to vent your rage. Typing an illiterate blistering stream of curses into the chat window only makes it more likely that you’ll drive off the fun seekers who make poker profitable.
All the bastards who engage in this behavior can go straight to hell where they can play .25/.50 for all eternity and never get a hand better than Q7o.
I agree that most complaints about “bad” play are annoying and usually self-serving. But I did have a situation today that deserved ful scorn.
I am in a satelluite tournament where the top 10 places get seats at a tournament. So essentially 1st throught tenth place are all the same. There are 11 players left, critical time. There are five at my table and the short stack for the is also at the table. He eventually goes all in, lest he be blinded out and he gets three callers. Now what should happen here? The three hands should check down through the whole hand. But after they check down through the turn, one of the guys, the large stack, bets huge on the river??? So that was stupid enough, but he had nothing just made it even stupider. The other two guys feel compelled to fold and the original short stack wins the hand and quadruples up.
Honestly that was stupid and he got called on it, as he deserved to be.
Gangster Octopus, that does suck. But it even happens on poker’s biggest stage; this happened at the WSOP $1,500 NLHE Event this year:
Cunningham went on to win the bracelet in this event.
AAAAAAAARRRRRGGGHH! Death! Asshole! Haaaaaaaaate! As much as I try not to berate players (with, admittedly, varying degrees of success depending on the stupidity of the play and whether I’ve been drinking), this play always gets a plateful of wrath. I don’t understand what the bluffer thinks is going to be accomplished, and I especially don’t understand why this play is epidemic when the all in player would go out on the bubble. I was in an Omaha 8 single table tournament not too long ago, four left top three paid, and one idiot kept bluffing the other two of us out against the all in short stack and never caught. He either did not or was not capable of understanding that what he was doing was very very stupid. I ended up going out 4th because of that idiot, who probably, because there is no justice in poker, went on to win it.
JSLE, do I perhaps know you from PokerRoom and TB, under another Stamos name?
I think you have me confused with one of John Stamos’ other ears… It’s okay, it happens all the time. 
What is a poker authority? Are there poker universities giving out poker doctorates? I cheerfully acknowledge that a number of people say the game has ethics, but I don’t see this as evidence. I can imagine someone voluntarily setting up a poker league or association (or even just a specific tournament) whose members agree to conform to an ethical standard, and at that point poker ethics exist for members of that organization. The game itself, though remains ethically neutral.
By your offered definition, ethics are the principles of conduct governing an individual or group. Do poker players form a “group”? If I sit down at a poker table, have I tacitly accepted membership in something?
Having mulled it over, I’ll concede that certain behaviours that are not outright cheating can be considered unsportsmanlike or a breach of etiquette, in that they reduce the overall enjoyment of the players. Assuming an “ethical” standard takes the game more seriously than it deserves.
Anyway, Otto folded our side-pot, so I’ll collect those chips.
Not you.
Yes, yes… touché. :rolleyes:
So ethics are something that are handed down to a population by authorities? They can’t arise spontaneously from within the community or culture?
I’m not sure why you’re so resistant to the idea that a game like poker can have a set of ethics associated with it. If a profession can have its own set of professional ethics, why can’t poker have its own set of ethics? What exactly am I missing here?
Given that the line is arbitrarily drawn, I simply prefer that an important concept like “ethics” be applied narrowly, to activities which are inarguably actual professions with well-defined guidelines for membership and procedures for expulsion. By way of analogy, the organization known as Major League Baseball holds its members to an ethical standard in order to preserve the organization. It is not necessary to expand this standard to cover non-MLB baseball players.
I’m not resisting the idea of universal poker ethics. I simply don’t see the need for them when “sportsmanship” and “etiquette” are sufficient.
Hee, I got berated for the first time today! Bonehead was trying to buy every pot no matter what he had with big preflop raises when he was first to act, and big reraises if someone raised in front of him. I broke him with pocket 99 against his AKs and he lit into me for my “terrible call” of his 9x the pot all in reraise. Then he bought in for the max, lost it all in one hand, bought in again and lost it to me two hands later with QJos against my JTs when I flopped the nuts. He flipped out and left, which upset me greatly because I had high hopes that he’d stick around long enough to pay my December rent.
How would you differentiate “sportsmanship” and “eitquette” from ethics in this particular instance? Aren’t they, in effect, the same thing?
I’ve no doubt I could get dictionary-citers disagreeing, but I’ll offer up this:
Good sportsmanship and etiquette are mostly unwritten social rules designed to keep a specific activity (by which I mean one specific contest or encounter) from becoming unpleasant. This can involve as few as two people in, for example, an athletic contest or deciding who will hold open a door for whom.
Ethics are mostly written professional rules designed to keep an organized activity, possibly involving hundreds or thousands of people, from becoming unpleasant. Doctors, lawyers and accountants (for example) are members of professional organizations with standards that all members must meet. In order to maintain the prestige of these organizations, there are imposed rules of behaviour to which all members must adhere or risk expulsion.
As I see it, poker is not an organized activity with a formal membership. If someone wants to form a poker league with members bound by ethical rules which are meaningful, I’ll gladly acknowledge the existence, within that league, of poker ethics. Claiming that a generic poker ethic exists and is (or should be) imposed on a person simply for sitting down at a poker table is stretching the term “ethics” unreasonably. Bad behaviour can get you expelled from a particular game or a particular casino; it cannot bar you from playing poker. In contrast, practicing medicine, law or accountancy after losing your professional standing does carry penalties. Professional organizations are required to be selective about their memberships, whereas any adult can sit down at a table and start playing poker for money.
Poker is not organized or professional enough to support an ethical system. Poker players can’t cheer the profitable inexperience of “fish” while simultaneously seeking to elevate their game to some noble plateau where ethics apply.
In my opinion, of course.
Say what? Are you implying that in order to be ethical one needs a handbook that spells it all out? Do you even think before you type?
I’ll try to steer this discussion back on track. Whenever I get “rivered” and find myself on the wrong end of a bad beat, I just think of my favorite poker expression:
“You can’t have fish without a river.”
Do you think after you read? I realize the Pit is the place for kneejerk reactions sprinkled with insult, but I went ahead and spelled out the reasoning behind my admittedly arbitrary determination regarding the lack of basis for “poker ethics” in plain enough text.
If some of the words are too big for you, please resume reading the work of Dr. Seuss. I understand Green Eggs and Ham is a real page-turner.
Heh, how about “no-one gets screwed without a turn” ?
Brian, i’m suprised that you would choose to define “ethics” in a way that is so completely divorced from the reality of the way the word is used by the vast majority of the population.
While your narrow definition does fit within the general usage of the term “ethics,” it is but a subset of the broader category. And virtually every modern dictionary (at least, every one i was able to consult) adopts a much broader definition of ethics than you will allow. Even the notoriously descriptivist Merriam-Webster has not seen sufficient shift in usage to adopt your narrow view.
All the dictionaries i consulted make clear that ethics is—and has been for a long time—concerned with general principles of right or moral conduct. When the dictionaries do address your definition of ethics, they do so usually as the third or fourth category, making clear that this is but one type of ethics, and they even sometimes give it a term of its own—professional ethics.
That you can be so obtuse about this is rather startling. You have called your determination “arbitrary.” Well, yes it is. Unfortunately, it’s so far outside generally accepted usage as to make your arguments completely nonsensical.