Another month, another lot of egg on the face of poker. As if Black Friday wasn’t enough. As if the collapse of Full Tilt wasn’t enough. While governments contemplate whether our beloved game is skill or chance, while TV networks take a breather to decide just how ‘wholesome family entertainment’ our little corner of the universe is, it would be useful if the criminals, scammers and degenerates among us could just lie low for a while.

Oh. OK, maybe not then.

First, the so-called “Girah” scandal. Anyone who read the Bluff Europe interview with Jose Macedo must have felt that after the sequence of Durrrr and Isildur1, this was all getting a bit Milli Vanilli. I mean, some 18 year old Portuguese guy who had been on the scene for about 20 minutes being the next media darling? That was stretching it a bit, and the rapidity with which the story went downhill after Macedo won his Lock Poker sponsorship proves that.

Then Chino Rheem gets crowned as the inaugural champion of the Epic Poker League. The 2+2 forum thread got it spot on. The EPL had been specifically aiming to produce a community of not just the technically best players, but the most respectable and decent (read: media friendly) players. The first winner of the League having, as Chad Holloway put it, “developed a reputation as a debtor, swindler, and borderline sociopath”, was probably not the start Pollack and Duke wanted.

There are a number of facets of poker which are responsible for the mess we find ourselves in. They are poker’s Dark Side. They’ve always been there, and to be honest, they probably always will. The question – and this is one that will determine which direction poker goes in over the next decade – is of whether we can deal with and abate poker’s dark side. I’d like to call these issues out, candidly, so those of us who would like to see poker become a more honourable, honest and openly enjoyable pastime can at least set to work on how to do it.

Poker can ruin lives

Alcohol ruins lives, probably many more than poker could ever do, but would you prefer to live in Saudi Arabia?

The key is to accept that certain pleasures in life carry with them a risk. Certain people will fall foul of that. With enough checks and balances in place, the number of people who suffer can (I hope) be made acceptable. I say “I hope” because – and I have to be honest here – I think the court is still out on this issue in poker. There is a lot of delusion in poker and I believe the best way to ameliorate that is to remain open and keep educating ourselves. As with alcohol, the vast majority of people enjoy poker with little or no ill effect.

To take the opposite view – to close down these avenues through fear of what could be, is to live a life without risk. To paraphrase Thoreau – the life without the marrow sucked out of it is not a life worth living.

Poker’s origins involve a criminal element

Poker is sometimes not so nice a place. Born in the Wild West, its very origins are synonymous with lawlessness. Before the advent of computerised banking and international financial cooperation, poker would have been a very good place to launder money. Who needs to launder money? Traffickers of drugs and people. Burglars and Larceners. It’s not surprising that poker’s origins lay in seedy dens and smoke-filled back rooms, even in the countries where it wasn’t illegal.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that poker players are criminals. The poker boom helped bring in a greater cross section of society, which in turn increased its legitimacy to a wider demographic. Poker databases helped keep track of poker winnings and the accountability of online poker sites made money laundering much harder. Poker has moved on from its past, but its reputation hasn’t quite yet; we need to ramp up the PR on this front.

Poker has a tremendous luck factor – more than most within it are prepared to admit

Despite what many lobbyists would have you believe, poker has a lot of gamble in it. This attracts a certain type of character and results in certain outcomes for them.

The delusion, scamming and huge debts in the stories of Macedo and Rheem are not new. Ask any old timer you know in the game, and they’ll give you dozens of stories of people who went broke owing money and haven’t shown their heads for years.

Every time I write an article concerning the amount of variance in the game, I’m surprised. The maths doesn’t lie. If a relatively sober-headed nerd with a significant training in stats such as me can be surprised, you can bet that plenty of people out there aren’t getting it either. That’s a problem, because it means that people will convince themselves too much and too often that the bankroll blip they are experiencing is an aberration. My point? It isn’t an aberration – that’s just how gambly poker is, and we need to be honest with ourselves about that.

Sure, we aren’t the kind of characters like Macedo and Rheem to actually become sociopathic about this, but I would say most of us would be capable of losing hundreds of thousands chasing a dream if we had luckboxed millions to start with.

I believe this is the beginning of poker’s journey rather than the end. It’s been a dark year, and things may well get darker before the proverbial dawn. Will things ever go back to 2006 levels? Perhaps not, but I would like to see a poker world where more of the above is accounted for and accepted, even if that makes poker a more niche pursuit. Too many people in poker wish to remain in denial about its dark side. I think we would fight it better by accepting it and learning how to deal with it.