Wednesday, May 14th, 2008
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We don’t condone gambling here at PFB, we encourage it. No, I kid. (Although, as I’ve said before, I have no problem with gambling in moderation.)
If you’re the gambling type, or the “I can’t get enough of the NFL” type, let me direct your attention to Vegas Watch, who just posted the NFL Over/Unders for 2008. Those are the win totals in the first column. (source of over/unders: Sportsbook.com)
Seeing these for the first time begs the question (actually two questions)
1. If forced to put $500 double-or-nothing on your favorite team (ignoring the money lines), would you take the over or under on wins for the season?
2. Do any of these stand out to you as a pretty good bet?
I’ll give you my answers in the comments…
Tags: Football, gambling
Posted in NFL, previews | 3 Comments »
Thursday, February 7th, 2008
editor’s note: if you came to this page wondering if playing poker is a sin, might I suggest you read my post on that exact topic?
Is poker a sport? Honestly, I don’t know. They do put it on ESPN. But then again, they put “Who’s Now” on ESPN too, and that had as much to do with sports as the Tampa Bay Devil Rays have to do with winning. Sport or not, it does involve competing, and if you know anything about the game of Poker, you know that it can make for some riveting television.
If you spent any time over the past 5 years watching televised poker, then you probably know who Daniel Negreanu is. He’s the quirky Canadian player who loves to talk at the table and has a knack for reading other players better than most. One thing you might not have known is that he is a Christian.
Aaron Todd, on his blog “Gaming Guru”, interviewed Negreanu in 2006, and said of Negreanu’s conversion:
A few months after they started dating, Negreanu’s wife Lori mentioned that she was a Christian and she felt it was important for Negreanu to explore his faith. He read A Case For Christ by Lee Strobel, and when he finished, he felt like there was “no option other than believing.”
Like he does at the table, when it came to the idea of a Christian making a living by playing poker, Negreanu had a lot to say:
“There is no reference anywhere in the Bible, not one scripture that says gambling is a sin or gambling is wrong,” Negreanu says. “There are sinful things that can come out of a love for money. If you have an addiction to money and a love of money, yeah, that’s sinful, but that doesn’t have anything to do with gambling per se. You can do that if you’re a businessman or a corporate man who is just hording his money and not sharing.
“The way I look at it, it’s not how you make your money — as long as you’re not doing anything to cheat people or hurt others — it’s what you do with it. Certainly I’m going to be at a poker table with people that shouldn’t be there — where gambling has become a problem. I think gambling only becomes sinful when it becomes a problem in your life and it impedes your walk with God or with your family. From my perspective, if I’m playing with these people that are going to lose their money anyway, I can turn (bad) money into (good) money.
“It’s no different than being a stock broker. How does one believe gambling is a sin and that playing the stock market isn’t? What is the difference? You’re making an investment on something you don’t really know what is going to happen with. You do your research, like you research a poker hand. You say ‘Well, I think this has expected value, I think I will make money with this hand.’ But you don’t always, sometimes you have some bad luck or you get the wrong read. When you research a business, you say ‘Well, I think this stock is going to go up,’ and make an investment in it. Sometimes it goes up and sometimes it goes down. Where is the difference?”
When BLUFF Magazine asked Negreanu if there were Christians who had a problem with his profession in November of 2006, he had this to say:
I think only the ignorant ones. My wife’s family are devoted conservatives to the point where she wasn’t even allowed to watch TV as a child, but they’re fine with me. They’re totally fine with what I do for a living. They understand that, you know, there is nothing in the Bible anywhere that says gambling is a sin. Nothing. I think a lot of people misunderstand gambling — OK, it’s essentially taking money from other people. Well, there isn’t a business in the world in which that doesn’t happen. When you win on the stock market, others lose. Any business deal you make, you’re going to take someone’s money. It’s what you do with that money that separates whether you’re healthy or unhealthy. If you hoard all that money for yourself, just to own a bigger home, well, I guess that might be wrong. But there’s nothing wrong with poker according to the Bible. But having said that, a lot of people misinterpret what it says and think that what I do is wrong. To those people, I just try to talk to them and explain to them. But some of them just won’t get it. But that’s OK. I’m not really a fan of conservatism anyway.
Of course, when you make your faith public, you open yourself up to criticism. When Negreanu blogged in April about the priorities in his life (1. God, 2. Family, 3. Health, 4. Poker, and 5. Stuff), some folks jumped on him, throwing scripture back in his face.
What do you think? Do you think Negreanu is wrong to make a living playing poker? If all of a sudden you realized you were an exceptional poker player, would your conscience be okay with you making a living doing it?
Show your cards in the comments…
Tags: Daniel Negreanu, gambling, Poker
Posted in Christianity, morality, sports | 12 Comments »
