I agree with your points but one thing worth noting is that this article was in the Education section. I doubt that it was the author's intent to portray the coming of poker to college campuses as a good thing.

wolvish, I think I disagree with you. Here's why.

If I had made $120,000 playing poker by age 22, I would feel like I had a clue about how to play the game already. And if I were a smart person who knows how to keep learning, I would feel like I was likely to keep getting better and better at poker.

Now, I wouldn't be likely to say what this guy said if I were talking to another poker player. But I bet this was in response to this reporter's questions. The reporter was no doubt saying things like "My expert says that everybody reverts to the mean and only breaks even. How do you know that won't happen to you?" To that question, the proper answer is, duh lady, I have already proved that I'm good at this game, and I'm going to get better, not worse, so reversion to the mean is unlikely. I don't even have losing sessions very often. It ain't about luck, it's about skill.

And even with all that, the reporter still concludes by assuming it's all about luck. Sheesh.

I talked to a reporter one time -- one time only. It was during the run-up to the 2000 elections, and I was a professor of religion and ethics at a Lutheran school in a smallish city in far northwestern Minnesota. A local TV news reporter wanted to talk to me about politics and religion. I said sure, come on let's talk. Maybe you'll learn something. But she showed up and she didn't want to learn anything. She asked me a whole bunch of questions, but it was obvious from the get-go that what she wanted was a couple of sentences from me that would confirm the story she had already written. I thought her story was completely wrong-headed, and typical of people who really don't understand how politics and religion really affect each other. So I talked to her about that, doing everything I could to explain a more complex, nuanced, set of ideas. We talked for probably 90 full minutes. At the end, she said thanks, and left, and then she wrote the story the way she wanted to, using like 10 seconds of our interview on the air -- the part that could be construed as me agreeing with what her original thesis was. Of course.

I agree with S: this was going in the education section of the paper, so there was only one possible conclusion to the story. No amount of information the reporter could have learned would have changed the pre-ordained conclusion of the piece.