Why play poker, especially tournaments?

OK, this probably isn't the post you're expecting on the eve of Day 2 of the World Championship, but it's a fair question so let's take a stab at it.

Poker itself is highly debatable, but the case against poker tournaments is trivially easy to make. They are extraordinarily stressful (it's like having your testicles squeezed in a slowly tightening vice for a week), exhausting, time-consuming, and only marginally profitable at best. At least 80% of the time you'll put in a lot of hard work for absolutely no return. You spend hour after hour with a bunch of mostly sleazy characters whose idea of love is hookers, whose idea of culture is sports betting, whose only goal is to take as many of your chips as quickly and efficiently as possible. Repeated exposure ruins one's attention span, messes with your dopamine balance, and makes conventional work pretty much unthinkable.

Final tournament preparations obviously preclude a complete response here, but here's four plausible reasons.

Escape--The game of poker is so compelling it's the ultimate escape. Whether it's a tough day at the office, a spousal argument, or even a 102 degree fever, once the cards are in the air you are magically transported to a world where nothing else matters.

Masochism--If you're at all familiar with Amos Tversky's work on loss aversion then you know that people are hurt by losses twice as much as they feel good by the corresponding gains. Who but a masochist would enter a poker tournament, where the payoff structure is guaranteed to give 90% of the entrants nothing and leave everyone else except the first place finisher somewhat disappointed as well?

Addiction--Let's face it, poker is highly addicting. I can't count the number of times I've gone downstairs at night to "peak in on the kids" or sat down at my desk intending to check the markets and five minutes later found myself playing three games at once.

It's the best game ever--Sorry, chess players, but a simple alpha-beta pruning algorithm makes your game computationally equivalent to tic-tac-toe while all but the very simplest poker problems are computationally infeasible even before you throw in the most compelling part of poker: adapting your game to the psychological make-up of the players around you and weaving as much larceny as possible into a plausible narrative that takes into account the recent history of the game. Finally, while I've only slightly exaggerated the sleaziness of the average poker player, at the higher levels there are increasingly many clever, imaginative, daring, and totally honest human beings with a razor-sharp wit honed to sharpness by the whims of randomness.

I'm going with the fourth explanation, but I suspect a more honest answer is more like "all of the above."