Depending on who you ask, yes, poker is a sport. I know; I couldn’t believe it either. This begs the question then, what constitutes a sport? This debate has reached the lips of many in the past couple of years since channels such as ESPN and Versus are airing things like fishing, hunting, and poker. Is curling a sport since it is included in the Olympics when baseball isn’t? Does something like poker, that deals mostly with luck and features no athleticism at all, demand two weekly hours of primetime coverage on a sports network? Is video gaming a sport when you never leave your chair? I am here to solve this dilemma definitively, once and for all!
When I say definitively, I mean it. I have turned to the internet’s dictionary for the definition of what constitutes a sport and my research astounds me. There are 27 different definitions of “sport”. Hmmm…we’re going to have to whittle this down some. First, anything that isn’t a noun we can throw out since we’re looking for the idea of what “sport” is, so that eliminates 13 definitions. Easy enough. Next we can eliminate anything dealing with botany, which I never even knew had “sports”. Two more down. After that, we can eliminate the people who play sports since we need to know what “sport” is before we can speak of sportsmen or sportsmanship. That cuts the field in half to six. Next we can eliminate the “sport” that deals with making fun of people and that leaves us with two basic definitions.
First: an athletic activity requiring skill or physical prowess and often of a competitive nature, as racing, baseball, tennis, golf, bowling, wrestling, boxing, hunting, fishing, etc.
Second: a diversion; recreation; pleasant pastime.
Interesting. According to the first definition, which is usually the most widely accepted, poker and video games would most definitely not be sports. Although they can be highly competitive, neither requires athletic ability. If you tried to use the second definition though then you could list almost anything as a sport. You could therefore say what I do at 2 AM in front of my computer screen in my basement is a sport by the second definition.
…You sick monkeys. I was talking about writing on my blog!
I think that pretty much settles it. The keys to what constitutes a sport is that it must involve two things: a direct, clear-cut competition between two or more individuals or teams of individuals, and it must have some athletic prowess involved that would prevent any regular Joe from becoming an instant superstar. This means that poker and video games are not sports. Sorry Greg “Fossilman” Raymer. Maybe if you ran your fat a** on a treadmill while playing poker, we could call you a sportsman, but until then, you’re just another guy with a bad gimmick that can play a game very well. And maybe the International Olympic Committee should get their heads out of their a**es and re-institute baseball.
-Ray Carsillo
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