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Poker’s Positive Economic Impact; Including over 119,000 jobs


(Cross-posted excerpt from research I did for Raising for Effective Giving.)

Amazingly, no one has ever calculated the full economic impact of poker. Some top line statistics on poker’s annual worldwide economic impact:

  • $5.16 billion in economic impact
  • 108,240 jobs created directly and indirectly from live poker
  • $1.25 billion in direct and indirect tax revenue from live poker
  • 11,660 jobs created directly and indirectly from online poker
  • $47 million in direct and indirect tax revenue from online poker

Read the full article here.

Author Description

Louie Helm is a Machine Learning Engineer

One Response to “Poker’s Positive Economic Impact; Including over 119,000 jobs”

  1. April 14

    Aleksei Riikonen

    This whole concept of calculating “economic impact” this way is deeply flawed (when people take it to mean more than it actually does). Ok, it says people are spending this much money on poker, but in order to know whether the amount of jobs or tax revenue or whatever created was actually impressive, or even a net good, one would have to know what was the *alternative*, i.e. what would have happened instead of that poker spending in the world where poker didn’t exist.

    This same problem exists for all people saying things like “my business has created X jobs and paid Y in taxes”. To know whether that is actually productive at all, one would need to know what where the alternative spending decisions that one’s business replaced. (And actually there are lots of other complicating factors too.)