Jack Ury, the 97 year old geriatric again has been getting ridiculous amounts of TV coverage at the World Series this year as he made it to day 3 of the tournament.

Ury, the oldest ever player to play in the history of the WSOP starting player poker in 1953 but only played his first WSOP Main Event in 2007 at the ripe old age of 94. At the Main Event in 2007, the ESPM cameras fell in love with the old man, and he landed up being one of the stars of the tournament.

One amazing thing about Jack is he has little or no vision in one eyes and the other eye only has around 20% vision. Plus add to the fact that Jack can only hear out of one ear gives him one hell of a disadvantage.

The senior citizen who hails from Indiana needed a tad of assistance during play, and it was great to see the other players help. Opponents helped Jack with his blinds and antes, and his grandson Seth was behind him to help him stack his chips if he won a pot. Players also helped him by announcing raises and letting him know what was on the board.

And plus; I must say, I’ve never seen such an old person wearing a baseball style hat. He looks fantastically cool. I’m going to get my grandfather a hat this week.

Play resumes on Monday with Ury sitting on around 8.200 chips.

Let’s hope he wins.

I just read this cool article in Time magazine about people and risks and reward and took the liberty of paraphrasing it:

There’s plenty to learn about gambling if you’re willing to analyze 27 million hands of online poker. Luckily we don’t have to do that, thanks to academics like Kyle Siler of Cornell University who did his doctoral study on humans handle risk, reward and variable payoffs. Siler specifically looked at poker as a microcosm for the macrocosm we call life.

Siler’s overall finding was that the more hands you win, the more money you’re likely to lose. Although, these implications go much further than a game of poker.

For research purposes Siler limited the extraneous variables by sticking to no-limit Texas Hold’Em with 6 players. He used a software system called PokerTracker that collected and collated information and he began to notice that the number of hands won did not necessarily correlate to the amount of money won. In fact the amount of hands won seemed to correlate more with the amount of money lost.

The reasons for this are actually quite logical. The longer winning players played the more confident they got, the higher the bets, and the likelier the chances of getting blown out on a few very big hands got. It’s the multiple smaller gains that seemed to outweigh the bigger wins and losses in this study. “People overweigh their frequent small gains vis-à-vis occasional large losses,” Siler says.

Small stakes players do better with small-denomination cards- people who don’t gamble much tend to win more with cards ranging from twos to sevens- the theory is that the modest numerical worth of these cards is easier to understand for less experienced players- while they are valuable they are not that valuable.

How does this translate into everyday life? Investing, driving, buying a house or just stepping out the door involves the taking of risks and uncertain rewards. The more times you speed a little the more times you will speed a lot.

“These kinds of calculations are made every day,” says Siler. “Adultery is another good example. People get away with it countless times but they get caught just once and they lose everything.”

People take a lot of small chances and win, but then tend to take big chances and lose big. Siler points out that the entire nation of Iceland went bankrupt during the recent financial crisis buy operating in a similar way, by trusting high-risk, high-reward investments that failed to pay off.

Whether gambling with chips or gambling with life it seems clear that people should gamble only what they can afford to lose — and know when they’re approaching those stakes.

Well, this is a Poker Blog, so I think it’s pretty obvious which side we’re hedging our bets on.

Poker is a game of skill and in many pro-poker fronts is not considered to be gambling. Here’s why:

Gambling is associated with luck or chance and with the odds being stacked heavily against you to lose your money. The house will make more money than you if you are gambling over time. This is a fact.

While a certain amount of gambling can take place during a poker game, this generally only happens when a player is behind in a hand and decides to leave their chances ‘up to fate’. If this becomes a habit the player will lose in the long term.

The ‘naturally lucky’ poker players who seem to have ‘good fortune’ on their side are in fact highly skilled and knowledgeable. Skilled poker players also know that if they stick with their skills and knowledge they will have and steady and growing income. This is not gambling. The reason why poker is put in the category of gambling is because casinos like to use poker to attract players, not to make money. Poker players will generally be accompanied by a partner who will play games that truly are a gamble such as slots or craps.