Poker isnt regulated - GAMBLING is. Anyone can play poker any way they want, with zero regulation. Its the GAMBLING component that is regulated. Otherwise everything you said aligns with what i said, whether you realise it or not.While I'm sure the statement was a joke (even if a rather poor one), that's not quite how gambling works either.
You don't just put money down on an "unknown result" - you put it down on an unknown result FROM A SET RANGE OF RESULTS. And if things fall far enough outside of that range, you have the same recourse as with a messed-up food order. If your dice explode or your card suddenly comes up fifteen of stars or someone runs in and snatches up the roulette ball or whatever, that's still an unknown result - but it's not gambling, and you would get your money back.
In that sense, a food order could also be considered "gambling" just with a much narrower range of results - maybe the food is just a LITTLE different or a LITTLE less tasty than you thought; not enough for a refund, but well within the range of possible results you accept as an outcome for such a transaction. But that's more of a nitpicky technicality than a practical definition.
What's really setting actual gambling apart is two things: 1. the outcome is intentionally determined by chance to some meaningful degree; 2. you accept loss of the stake/wager (or at least a substantial part of it) in the event of an unsuccessful outcome within the predetermined range of the game.
That's why food orders aren't REALLY gambling: you don't expect them to be intentionally random, and you don't accept them to go so wrong you lose your money. That's also why (legitimate) investments or insurance policies aren't gambling: you might lose all your money, but even though they may be subject to "randomness" (bad stuff happens) they're not intentionally designed to be that way.
Where most of the discussion happens is in 1. by the way: how much chance actually determines the outcome. Something like roulette is pretty close to true random (unavoidable physics limitations aside). But something like e.g. poker is much more difficult to gauge - yes it has a lot of randomness in it, but it also has a significant amount of skill. A skilled poker player will get better results over a lesser-skilled player; but no roulette player can get better numbers than any other (and indeed no roulette betting system can ever remain profitable).
That's why it's difficult to determine what's going on in complex games like DI. There's a lot of factors in play where one might argue that chance can be "outplayed". Sure a 0.04% drop is forever a 0.04% drop, but over time more skilled players will still get more than lesser-skilled players (by virtue of playing more efficiently, usually). Is that enough skill to elevate it out of "chance-based" and into "skill-based" more than as a matter of technicality? That's largely for courts to decide.
It's harder than you think. Most people would easily agree that being good at poker means you win more over time and skill directly converts into success; and yet despite that, poker has been legislated in many jurisdiction as gambling, and banned or regulated as a result (see the collapse of US online poker some years back for that very reason). It's a very complicated, very tricky field.
There very well could be poker specific sections of the gambling laws, but they are still gambling laws.