Poker is not a chance game

"Poker is a microcosm of all we admire and disdain about capitalism and democracy . It can be rough-hewn or polished, warm or cold, charitable and caring or hard and impersonal. It is fickle and elusive, but ultimately it is fair, and right, and just."

"If you can't spot the sucker within the first half hour at the table, then you are the sucker."

"Whether he likes it or not, a man's character is stripped bare at the poker table; if the other players read him better than he does, he has only himself to blame. Unless he is both able and prepared to see himself as others do, flaws and all, he will be a loser in cards, as in life."

"There are few things that are so unpardonably neglected in our country as poker... Why, I have known clergymen, good men, kindhearted, liberal, sincere, and all that, who did not know the meaning of a 'flush'. It is enough to make one ashamed of one's species."

"Nobody is always a winner, and anybody who says he is, is either a liar or doesn't play poker."

"They anticipate losing when they sit down and I try my darnedest not to disappoint one of them."

"Poker is a game of people... It's not the hand I hold, it's the people that I play with."

"The guy who invented poker was bright, but the guy who invented the chip was a genius."

"Poker is the game closest to the western conception of life, where life and thought are recognized as intimately combined, where free will prevails over philosophies of fate or of chance, where men are considered moral agents and where - at least in the short run - the important thing is not what happens but what people think happens."

"Cards are war, in disguise of a sport."

"Poker is a godless game, full of random pain."

"Luck favours the backbone, not the wishbone."

" Is poker a game of chance?"

"Not the way I play it."

"Why do you think the same five guys make it to the final table of the World Series of Poker EVERY YEAR? What, are they the luckiest guys in Las Vegas?"