Academical response
You should not focuse on the randomness of the game, but on the lack of.
Ill explain
Robert caillois places every game in one of the following categories (simplified)
Agon: competitive games where the player needs a set of pre aquired skills, played in a plain field where the most prepared will come out victorious
Alea: the oposite of agon, those are games that uses randomness as its main characteristics, not needing any preparation what so ever, those are called games of chance.
Theres a few more types of games described by callois, but we will focuse on these two.
And by doing so we can place poker perfectly as a Agon, much more than alea.
- poker is a competitive game
- poker players study the game and those studies reflect directly on a players success.
- all the players play with the same deck.
- the most prepared will always win in the long run. We can observe that just looking at successfull players results.
Hence agon
Lets take a game of dice for example
- a player have the exact same odds for any result, marked by the dice number
- they dont need any training what so ever, training wont affect the outcome
- there is no such thing as a regular winner of dice.
Hence alea.
Ill finish with a quote
"The game (...) oposes to work, as the wasted time oposes to time well spent ” (CAILLOIS, 1990, p.9).