An Open Letter to CBS Sportsline

As much as I hate feeding trolls, I feel I have to do it this time, because the troll is CBS. Consider this my open letter to "national columnist" Gregg Doyel in response to his recent column on the CBS Sportsline website entitled "World Series of Poker Fails to Highlight Losers, Addiction". (And a tip of the hat to Change100 for bringing it to my attention.)

How does a "national columnist" for CBS Sportsline write such a horribly misinformed, poorly researched, and scaldingly vitriolic diatribe? Better yet, how does this columnist's editor agree to run such a diatribe?

When it comes to hard-core gambling, there are no winners. Just losers.

That's funny, I've been keeping spreadsheets for years that track my poker play, and they show me significantly in the black every year. Guess I'm just consistently lucky?

Those are great stories, but every lottery has its handful of winners.

Wait, I thought there were no winners. Which is it?

Those calls were placed within six months to the same hotline in Indiana.

Can you tell me what games the people who called the Indiana gambling hotline were playing? Were they playing house-banked games, by any chance? Because your article seems to use the World Series of Poker as a focal point for problem gambling, but it was very short on specific examples of poker-related problem gambling.

Some studies say as many as three percent of all Americans have a gambling problem

Some studies say that the Holocaust never happened. If you try hard, you can find a study that says just about anything. What do the bulk of the studies say? And why didn't you give comparative numbers for drug addiction and alcoholism, to which you thought fit to compare gambling at other points in the piece? Could it be because the rate of alcoholism in this country is almost double the highest number that "some studies" represent as the rate of people with a "gambling problem" (whatever that means)?

Freedom is cool. Gambling is not. Freedom to gamble is like freedom to inhale crack or inject heroin.

Hmm, so I guess really what you're saying is "freedom for you to act only in a way that I think is socially responsible" is cool, because the last time I checked, freedom meant "the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action", without any specific limits on what type of action was in question.

Admit it -- these three sentences make absolutely no sense. What you're telling me is that because "some studies say that as many as three percent of all Americans have a gambling problem", the other 97% should be prohibited from their enjoyment of an activity that produces negligible detrimental effects on society. Do I need to give you the rate of alcoholism in this country again, or can we just agree that you had a brain fart when you wrote those three sentences?

Regular people go to jail. Regular people commit suicide. Because of gambling.

Yes, and regular people go to jail and commit suicide because of infidelity. You're not making a particularly convincing argument here.

This year, almost 12,000 were expected.

Seriously, do some research. I don't know of a single industry analyst that predicted 12,000 entries into the Main Event this year. In fact, almost all of them predicted there would be fewer entries, due to the effect of the UIGEA on online poker sites (which were primarily responsible for the run-up in entries since 2003).

In closing, I would expect a "national columnist" for CBS Sportsline to be held to slightly higher journalistic standards than were displayed in this column. Gregg Doyel seems to have a personal axe to grind (perhaps a personal or family history of compulsive gambling). No poker player doubts that compulsive gambling exists and that it can ruin lives. All we ask for is a little more responsibility in the discussion of the issue, instead of the idiotic, uneducated shrieking found in this column.

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Folks, people with opinions like this are part of the reason why the UIGEA was passed and why so many of us have a difficult time finding a legitimate, legal live game. I'm not sure how we go about educating these people and disabusing them of their horribly misguided notions about poker and gambling, but I wouldn't expect any progress on these fronts (without the assistance of massive amounts of money and power) until we do.