The gambling aspect is a pretty obvious difference! There's nothing - or well, little - stopping you from gambling high stakes at chess, or go, or scrabble or dominion. It's just that those games are fun without gambling. Even some games that used to be heavily about gambling, like backgammon, have mostly turned into straight recreational games. But no-gambling poker really hasn't caught on. My guess it's that it's casinos, and a certain casino-adjacent culture/aesthetic, that has kept poker alive as a gambling phenomenon in this day and age.

Should we let casinos shape our culture in this way?