Poker survey PLEASE help!

I am a University of Central Florida student and I have to give out a poker Survey in order to graduate. I hope to get some idea of why people play poker and the differences between how males and females play. All information obtained through this survey will remain anonymous. I must get 150 survey responses. http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=XnxB6QV7MiH6hwXFIA4zOw_3d_3d
Thank you for taking my survey and helping me out.

Hello Lisa,

I glanced at your survey, and there's one thing I wanted to mention.

The title of your survey is "Why People Gamble and Gender Differences in gambling Behavior" Every question you asked is stated in terms of "gambling".

For those of us who study it, there is a BIG difference between poker and other games that involve chance. I mean casino games such as blackjack, roulette, craps, etc. There is an element of chance in all of them. But in pit games like blackjack, the odds are always against you. Luck may turn your way in the short term, but in the long run you will always lose. For skilled poker players, the short term involves some chance due to the cards, but in the long run we can consistently win money due to being better than our opponents. We are not playing against the house, we are playing against other people who, by making more mistakes than we do, earn us money. We definitely do NOT consider it gambling.

I don't know if your study only concentrates on poker, or if it includes other games involving more chance, but answers from poker players will be very skewed depending on how they view the game. And I believe the results of studying how and why people play poker are not representative as a whole of how and why people gamble.

Good luck with your project.

That survey is a mess - sorry!

• you are assuming all poker players are gamblers
• the "what is your main style question is way too limited for just about anybody to answer
• the normal stake/limit question does not include any of the limits most of us play at
• I couldn't even answer most of the questions

I must say that this is a very badly designed survey. Here are some of the flaws that I picked up in it:

1) It seems to assume that everyone in the world is American. For question 5 it is fortunate that I have a degree, as a lot of the answers would not apply to people from the UK.

2) Questions 7 and 8 do not seem to take account of people that have won money from freerolls or have had funds deposited at a poker site (I was given $5 at Full Tilt for Post of the Month by one forum, for example), and are now playing for real money but are not gambling their own money. The assumption seems to be that everybody that plays poker for real money is gambling their own money. That is a false assumption.

3) Questions 13 and 15 are asking you to say how often your friends and family play poker, but it is not possible to give one answer as various friends play different amounts of time.

4) Question 21 (How did you learn to play?) only allows you to give one answer, and does not include reading books as an answer. I used various ways of learning, and I'm sure that applies to a lot of forum members.

5) Question 24 asks whether I gamble online, and I have ticked yes because I do matched booking with various bookmakers online, even though poker is not gambling. Then in question 25 it says "If yes, do you prefer online or live play", which I assume refers to poker, but my answer to 24 was about gambling not about poker!

So I have completed it, but the results will not really prove anything due to the ambiguity of some of the questions. Good luck!

Um...what exactly are you reading at University? I ask this because the survey is very, very ill-conceived and littered with pre-supposition. If I'd have submitted this whilst completing my dergree I'd probably still be doing it. It might be an idea to have an understanding of the subject matter rather than pushing forward with assumptions.
I don't mean to be rude or disrespectful in any way but am offering a constructive opinion which should prove helpful. The bottom line is that the structure of this survey doesn't adhere to a level one would expect in higher education. In other words, the manner in which the survey is constructed will become a self-fullfilling prophecy to whatever results are required...not scientific and not degree standard.
Why not stick around and chat to a few people...many members of this forum have highly academic backgrounds and would be only too pleased to assist you. Who knows, you might even get to enjoy poker.
Hope this helps

I apologize if anyone took offence to my wording of gambling instead of poker. I should have worded my title differently. I am a poker player myself and my fiancé is striving to be a professional poker player. I did not mean anything derogatory by anything said in my survey. I just really wanted insight into why people play poker.

Oh dear Ischurch - you have met with some of the fury of the forum!! Take it from someone who knows. Poker is classified as gambling in many countries and many jurisdictions - why forum members are so hostile to this fact is unknown to me. Good luck with your survey. Some of the forum members here are really amazingly wonderful people but some of very protective of their poker playing.

Here we go again yowsa yowsa

carjaw said:

Oh dear Ischurch - you have met with some of the fury of the forum!! Take it from someone who knows. Poker is classified as gambling in many countries and many jurisdictions - why forum members are so hostile to this fact is unknown to me. Good luck with your survey. Some of the forum members here are really amazingly wonderful people but some of very protective of their poker playing.

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carjaw, as you know, the reasons to our objections to the use of the umbrella term gambling is evidenced, at great length, in your thread. It can hardly be "unknown" to you!

Iscurch, it is important background info for you, found here:
https://www.cardschat.com/forum/intros-foreign-languages-8/hello-can-you-help-phd-student-143491/

Ischurch, I teach advanced qualitative methods. Today was my last class of the term, yippee!!
We CCers have had problems with the several surveys visited here recently, no doubt you will learn more from comments in this thread than with your survey!

GL, I will not be filling out any more surveys right now. Waiting for one that makes sense to me as a social scientist, and as a skilled poker player, not a gambler. (OK OK so freerolls are a crapshoot, sue me!)

Just filled it out, hope it helped. Would love to see the findings.

carjaw said:

Oh dear Ischurch - you have met with some of the fury of the forum!! Take it from someone who knows. Poker is classified as gambling in many countries and many jurisdictions - why forum members are so hostile to this fact is unknown to me. Good luck with your survey. Some of the forum members here are really amazingly wonderful people but some of very protective of their poker playing.

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There are plenty of people at this forum that have never deposited, and have won money through freerolls, then built it up to a substantial sum of money. If a survey is to be fair, it needs to offer the option when it asks you how much money you deposit into poker sites on a monthly basis of saying NIL. This survey doesn't, so it is fairly obvious that the results will be misleading, boyo. Poker is a game of skill. Here is a relevant thread:

[old link~tb]

i might be repeating some things here but w/e. your survey is, to be blunt, horrible. i completed it to the best of my ability, but it's pretty bad.

Q6 - everyone who has played poker with some regularity has felt all of the stated emotions while playing. the question, as phrased, is pointless.

Q7 - how many "times do I gamble"? in the context of poker, is this how many hands do i play? is it how many sessions i play? if i'm playing four tables at once, is that one 'time' or four? if i go to the toilet in the middle of a session does that break my one 'time' into two? i assumed it to mean sessions, whether briefly interrupted or not, fyi. you would be far better off asking something like "how many hours a week do you spend gambling?"

Q8 - is this how much rake I give, how much i buy in to tables for in total, or how much i wager in total? (the distinction being for example if i buy in full to a $25NL table and get all in and split pots in my first two hands for $25 each time i've bought in for $25 but wagered $50). i assumed it was total buyin - the question needs more clarity.

Q22 - this doesn't allow for tournament players and the options are severely limited.

Q26 - see Q8

there's a lot more if you want me to be really nitpicky but those are my main issues (the whole poker/gambling thing aside because i really can't be bothered getting into that )

carjaw said:

Poker is classified as gambling in many countries and many jurisdictions

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That is because those who are doing the classification have revenue-related motives. They don't really understand, for the most part, the actual game of poker.

carjaw said:

Some of the forum members here are really amazingly wonderful people but some of very protective of their poker playing.

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Many of us don't like to be lumped in with people who play mindless games that have no real chance of being winnable over the long term.

Done, but yea I tend to agree with the other posters. The survey is badly thought out, if I was marking a survey like this it would be a certain fail. I would strongly recommend that you re-do it.

tenbob said:

Done, but yea I tend to agree with the other posters. The survey is badly thought out, if I was marking a survey like this it would be a certain fail. I would strongly recommend that you re-do it.

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With the above spelling mistake, it would be no surprise your survey would fail.
As for the other posters, I would have to agree with the whole layout, but I had filled it out to the best of my abilities by replacing the word gambling with the word poker when answering the questions.
Good luck with your marks you get from this survey.

Well I did it, and same as everyone says...not too good. But hopefully you get through your class!

I apologize if anyone took offence to my wording of gambling instead of poker. I should have worded my title differently. I am a poker player myself and my fiancé is striving to be a professional poker player. I did not mean anything derogatory by anything said in my survey. I just really wanted insight into why people play poker.

I hope that you aren't going to insult our intelligence by implying that the only weakness we have pointed out in your survey is that you referred to poker as gambling. Your survey is fundamentally flawed, and we have pointed out a whole variety of ways that it could be improved. The fact that you have now copied and pasted your previous reply gives me grave doubts about whether you actually are what you claim to be.

lschurch said:

I apologize if anyone took offence to my wording of gambling instead of poker. I should have worded my title differently. I am a poker player myself and my fiancé is striving to be a professional poker player. I did not mean anything derogatory by anything said in my survey. I just really wanted insight into why people play poker.

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Did you consult with your fiance on this survey? If so can we have his username at the sites he plays at cause I smell some easy money.

Another poker survey that needs help. LOL.

shinedown.45 said:

With the above spelling mistake, it would be no surprise your survey would fail.

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umm look again lol