poker is not sexy pt.1

I like poker as much as the next 18-49 male demographic, but there's way too much poker posing going on these days. I get the appeal of doing little work with the potential for big money, but there's also the WPT-induced illusion that quitting your real job to become a pro poker player is glamorous or will somehow impress women. I suppose you could argue that it's Cool, but here are my arguments for why poker is not Sexy:
- It's time-consuming. On TV, they don't show the hours and hours of folding crap hands. There's no clocking in and clocking out. You just have to stay there till you make money or you've had enough, which could take days. The only way you can make money during that time is if you think about nothing at all but playing poker. You can't tune out, or surf the Internet, or make pleasant conversation in your downtime, as with other jobs. After enough time at the table you will forget what pleasant conversation is.
- It's boring to non-poker-addicts. As with real estate law, there are many fascinating intricacies. As with real estate law, you don't actually want to hear about the intricacies unless you are in the same field. After you are done boring people with stories about how you hit a set on the river and won blah blah amount of money, you will start boring people with your rationalization about why it's okay to gamble and why you are not an addict.
- It's smelly. People in casinos have terrible hygiene. Even if you are not personally dirty, there's an excellent chance that you're sitting next to someone who has been there for 4 straight days without eating sleeping or showering. Those pretty shiny chips you gamble with have been in the hands of someone with Lyme disease. Even if you are not a loser, in order to win you have to constantly surround yourself with losers who are swimming in their own filth.
- It's not really Shana Hiatt's favorite sport. (Even when watching the show I can kind of tell in her delivery that the back of her brain is going, "What is the Big Deal...?") I often see big gamblers bring their girlfriends into the casino, and the girlfriends inevitably get bored, while the boyfriends ignore them completely to fixate on the game. I'm guilty of this myself, and it's not "focusing on the game," it's more like temporary insanity. The only women who actually get interested in the table action to the obsessive degree that the pro poker player does, are, of course, female poker players, but they are using their feminine wiles to disrupt your game and get your money, not your phone number. At the risk of a sexist generalization, I'd bet that 50% of the women in the casino on a Friday night are waiting patiently to leave, and the other 50% are gamblers. On the table, you're better off being on your own anyway....at least, better off in the poker department.
- It's expensive. Without belaboring the obvious, it's not expensive in the sexy way that new cars or other shiny things are expensive. Besides money, it costs valuable years of your life, and brain cells.
....Maybe this is part of the new trend to emasculate the Asian male. Except in this case we're demasculating ourselves by giving into our historically horrendous gambling inclination, and thereby sacrificing not only money, but a huge amount of game.