Luck is an essential part of poker. You'll get "lucky" in making your flush draw on the turn 1/5 times. Except that it isn't really luck, it's part and parcel of what the game is about and without those "lucky" things happening the game simply wouldn't work.

I know nothing about US football so correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the game would still work fine if QBs didn't throw the ball into the ref or someone slipped, ie if it were a game of pure skill.

I can see there's a difference here between games designed to be luck-free like football and chess, and those where luck is a necessary and intrinsic part of the game like poker or backgammon.

OK mofos, let's get something clear. The game could easily be declared a game of luck. The DAs (or whatever they are called) will only have to get some SD and WR numbers from any given players and prove that the results from say 100K hands can be drastically different. Then, for an average poker player that goes to the card room and plays an average of say 16hours/month @ 30 hands/hour that is 480 hands/month. Our average joe needs 208.33months or 17 yearsand 4 months to play an amount that even being significant can produce dramatically different results, even when some of you are going to say the results are not going to be very different, the mathemathical "certainty" says the oppossite.

If you consider that probably 16hours/months might be very inflated number for the average non-professional player, things get worse.

The long run is much longer than most people think, even when here we have some players who have played several 100K hands without great swings, that doesnt mean it is going to be the same for anyone else, or even for those same players in th next several 100K hands.

Anyone making a case establishing that poker is a game of luck because most players wont ever get to the "long run", is likely to convince a jury.

I believe they did declare it was luck
I will try to find the article

It's official then, poker is luck.