chilldream

The creators sure care if they can make back their development costs or not.

Gambling games are bad for the exact same reasons that grind-based are bad: people play them for the addictive reward mechanisms. If you're not affected by those mechanisms, you're usually left with garbage.

Variable rewards are also the reason why poker is one of the few games with a heavy skill component that can move large amounts of money directly between players; few people are willing to be a sucker. So losing players have to either get something else from the experience, or be convinced that they aren't losing players.

I said elsewhere in this thread that skill-based vs. luck based is a continuum. The most popular poker games tend to land on the sweet spot where "enough luck that bad players can think they're good" and "enough skill that you can actually be good" meet.

> It may be more the dealers themselves with the "casino" turning a blind eye.

That strikes me as even less likely. Given that dealers are tipped from winning players, they wouldn't want to cheat in the house's favor unless they're also pocketing the extra winnings. This is the equivalent of overcharging customers and then skimming from the register, except the store's surveillance is better than most.

FWIW, the one instance I have first-hand knowledge of someone being ratted out, it was the casino's owner. She asked a surveillance employee to destroy a tape and he sent it to the state Gaming Commission instead.

If it's company policy, the employees have plenty of incentive to snitch to gaming boards. I used to hang out with a lot of casino dealers in Washington state and every one of them would sell out their boss that day if they were told to do something like this.

> But if someone choose to go all-in blind pre-flop then they are choosing to play the game as pure gambling and their version of the game would be pure chance.

This isn't making the game pure chance; it's just cutting off that player from future decisions. The opponents still get to call or fold, which means the opponent is manipulating the odds that the all-in player will win a contested pot.

"Game of skill" vs. "game of luck" is not a binary distinction, but the law pretends it is. I think it's definitely closer to the "skill" end of the continuum than the "luck" end though.

Large companies tend to err on the side of taking down more than they legally "have to". I know of YouTube videos that were taken down because of copyright claims that were outright false (that is, the entity making the claim didn't even have any rights to the material that was allegedly being infringed). There's a lot of room to be more lenient than YT and still on the right side of the law.

Yeah, and for that matter "fundamentalism" has been associated with certain elements of the Christian right (like biblical literalism) at least since the 90's.

I've lost the link, but something like that actually did happen in the US recently. It surely helped that it was so flagrant and that there was video evidence, but a teacher was arrested for encouraging a bunch of kids to beat up another kid in the halls.

He didn't say it was like card counting. He said that it exists on a continuum, somewhere that is clearly less legitimate than card counting but not obviously cheating like bringing loaded dice.

Your analogy is actually worse; the cards came pre-marked. So they didn't mark the cards, but they did go out of their way to exploit the existence of marked cards.

Is this something that doesn't happen in some climates? I've never noticed nor even heard about this "toast sweat" in my life.

They may not even have permission to air what they already have; some of the developers hadn't even signed the contract yet.