Sports from the past week.

Past sports article for the week of 8/29/06

Gambling…... Is it a Sport?

By, Puns McKenna

The answer to that is split almost fifty-fifty. Many people in the betting world, mostly because of the Celebrity competitions, feel that gambling is a sport. So what do you think? Betting on a game of Blackjack… Late night games of Texas Hold‘em… Are these sports? Certainly it’s a battle of wits. As you have to bluff the house into losing, but is it really a sport? You put “Sports” into any search engine on the Internet and you’ll come up with about fifty to a hundred sites that list gambling as a sport.

Let’s take a look at some of the “sports” out there. Horse racing. That’s a sport. Horses running around a track chasing a mechanical carrot or bunny rabbit, or whatever it is they chase. Can you tell I don’t much watch horse races? Moving on. Let’s look at an easily defined sport. Baseball. Everyone agrees that baseball is a sport. Two teams competing against one another to score more points than the other.

Football, soccer, polo, hockey, those are all sports by strict definition. What is that definition you ask? Easy. A sport is a game of chance and skill engaged in by one or more individuals to reach a desired goal. For most the goal is to have fun, as most games are a diversion from real life anyway. For others it is the career they have chosen. It is a competition of like-minded individuals reaching towards proving who is the more skilled.

So can you say that Gambling is a sport? In a manner of speaking, yes. Yes you could, and here’s why. Gambling is like minded individuals participating in a game of chance for entertainment. Now whether that makes it a true sport or not is debatable, but by the strictest definitions it is a sport.

And just think of this. What do all of those sports have in common? Betting. You bet on football, baseball, hockey, soccer, polo, horse racing, etc. And you bet on gambling. Gambling is the art of betting on games of chance and apparently a sport as well.

I just have one piece of advice… The odds always favor the house.