Poker...Is it a game of skill or luck?

[yhelothar]

Definitely skill over luck.
There are people who can make a solid stable living off playing poker!

 

[silverpig]

I agree. What other "sport" has it's championship games filled with a majority of amateur players? To me the abundance of amateurs in major events proves there is more luck than skill involved.

To be fair, when sports are NEW, you get that. Look at snowboarding. 20 years ago pretty much anyone had a shot at being competitive if you spent 1-2 seasons snowboarding on a mountain. Now, not a chance.

Back in the early days of North American professional sports (hockey, football...) the pros were guys who had other jobs as plumbers etc, and played their sport as amateurs until they were able to get paid. Now you have to start training when you're 12 years old to make these leagues (usually).

Now, the luck element of poker can allow more amateurs to make it through just on the basis of, well, luck, so your point is valid, but there are some caveats.

 

[Krynj]

You don't see the same players. There is usually like 1 seasoned pro at the final table with 8 nubs every year. And now there are so many "pros" that its just a matter of odds. I don't get this argument.

Yeah, you're mostly right. Back in the day though, before the WSoP is what it is now, it was mostly the same players, every year. Now there's such a huge draw, there's new players all the time at the final table.

 

[gorcorps]

That is where most of the skill comes in, making the other players believe you have a better or worse hand when you don't.

But that's what I'm saying, you can't always know FOR CERTAIN that you have the best hand. You could be holding something that's better than every other hand out there save for one. The other guy can be holding a hand that beats every other hand save for 2. Both are going to have crazy confidence in their hands, but both of them (if experienced) will know what can beat them. They both know they're not the absolute best but that the odds are very much in their favor. Somebody is going to be upset.

And that's my point. I'm not trying to say it's all luck, or even majority luck... just that there's SOME luck involved.

 

[dank69]

But that's what I'm saying, you can't always know FOR CERTAIN that you have the best hand. You could be holding something that's better than every other hand out there save for one. The other guy can be holding a hand that beats every other hand save for 2. Both are going to have crazy confidence in their hands, but both of them (if experienced) will know what can beat them. They both know they're not the absolute best but that the odds are very much in their favor. Somebody is going to be upset.

And that's my point. I'm not trying to say it's all luck, or even majority luck... just that there's SOME luck involved.

There is no luck in reading another person's projected confidence.

 

[lothar]

Poker is lot like the stock market.

You didn't answer the question.
So is the stock market skill or luck?

If what you say is true in comparing poker to the stock market, then I will say both but mostly skill.

I've never played poker since I had it on my TI-83+ calculator in 200-2002.
I wouldn't know how to play poker today if someone asked me to.

 

[gorcorps]

There is no luck in reading another person's projected confidence.

You're giving humans wayyyyy to much credit. There are thousands of different hand combinations, and you think it's possible to differntiate the confidence of 2 people who both will have extreme confidence in their hands?

It's not even possible for the humans to SHOW that many levels of confidence, let alone see it.

Both think they won, both will go all in, but neither of them know for sure until the cards are flipped. Case closed.

 

[sdifox]

I say luck.


If you get shitty hand, you fold.
If you get good hand, you try to maximise without spoofing the other party.

key is getting the hand, which is not in the player's control, thus luck.

 

[JS80]

I say luck.


If you get shitty hand, you fold.
If you get good hand, you try to maximise without spoofing the other party.

key is getting the hand, which is not in the player's control, thus luck.

You're not playing poker correctly.

 

[lothar]

I say luck.


If you get shitty hand, you fold.
If you get good hand, you try to maximise without spoofing the other party.

key is getting the hand, which is not in the player's control, thus luck.

Interesting theory and conclusion.

 

[reallyscrued]

Both, over the long term skill.

Came in here to post this.

 

[GagHalfrunt]

The more the game is a grind like small limit stud the more it's about skill. The more the game becomes huge blind bets like no limit hold 'em the more luck is involved. Over a very long period the best players will do the best. But take 5 rookies and 5 pros at a single table of no limit hold em and the rookies will bust out the pros a very large percentage of the time.

 

[dank69]

You're giving humans wayyyyy to much credit. There are thousands of different hand combinations, and you think it's possible to differntiate the confidence of 2 people who both will have extreme confidence in their hands?

It's not even possible for the humans to SHOW that many levels of confidence, let alone see it.

Both think they won, both will go all in, but neither of them know for sure until the cards are flipped. Case closed.

Well if you say case closed, then that's that.
Have you seen Daniel Negreanu call out exactly what cards a player he has never met before in his life is holding? I have on several occasions.

 

[Capt Caveman]

Now you're essentially saying that roulette, blackjack, the lotto, and russian roulette are games of skill too.

Right, and it's still dictated by chance with most hands. You can make a "smart" bet, but you can't guarantee it'll turn out that way. It's very rare to know you have the absolute best hand that anyone can possibly have. Even if you're playing completely risk-neutral bets it's going to be very hard to be in favor of the odds every single time.

Still uses luck. Math and statistics cannot solve inherent luck.

You don't understand the math. The top poker players are mathematicians as well as having great people skills.

Calculating - pot odds, implied odds, hand combinations, outs, expected value, equity, etc. assist in making the most profitable decisions. It's one reason why many pro players play limit poker outside of the tournies as it eliminates the bad beats one can receive in no-limit and odds will overcome luck in the long-run.

 

[AstroManLuca]

You're giving humans wayyyyy to much credit. There are thousands of different hand combinations, and you think it's possible to differntiate the confidence of 2 people who both will have extreme confidence in their hands?

It's not even possible for the humans to SHOW that many levels of confidence, let alone see it.

Both think they won, both will go all in, but neither of them know for sure until the cards are flipped. Case closed.

How likely is it for two players to be dealt hands good enough for them to be extremely confident? If that is the only situation in which you can say for certain that luck trumps skill, then luck is a tiny part of the game.

Besides, look at how much betting and stuff takes place pre-flop. Plenty of bad pre-flop hands would be great if they just wait for the flop, but in many cases they fold before they can even see. So that takes a lot of the luck out of it.

The statistically worst hand, 7-2 off suit, can still result in two pair, three of a kind, or a full house on the flop, but it rarely gets played because those almost never happen.

Watch some poker sometime. I've seen people go all-in with horrible hands because they know it'll get their opponent to back down. That has nothing to do with luck and everything to do with skill. It's all about assessing not just what the other players might have in their hands, but how risk-averse they are at the moment. Someone who's low on chips and fighting to get back in the game will play differently from someone who is sitting pretty.

 

[Juked07]

I agree. What other "sport" has it's championship games filled with a majority of amateur players? To me the abundance of amateurs in major events proves there is more luck than skill involved.

Relative to the variance of the outcomes, a tournament offers a ridiculously small sample size. If NBA games were only 30 seconds long, and anyone could compete, a lot of amateur teams could make it far due to variance as well.

Does this mean the current NBA teams are not better? No. Does it mean the game is dominated by "luck" even though over large samples the better teams perform better? I don't know, depends on your definition of luck I suppose.

In cash games however, especially online games, players actually accumulate statistically significant sample sizes (6-7 figures of hands played) on a regular basis, and their performance converges to their expectation by law of large numbers. In this case I think it is clear that their results are highly correlated with their skill, and have very little to do with the variance or luck involved in poker.

EDIT: I realize I fail to explain some underlying assumptions in this post. Many people probably understand this regardless, but for those who don't: Poker is a game, and I mean this in the game theoretic sense, where results are determined by a well defined set of rules, decisions, and outcomes. There is randomness in the outcome, but your expectation (the average result over an infinite sample size) is well determined by the strategy (set of decisions in all situations) the players are playing. This means that the results of a player in a given tournament can be accurately modeled by a distribution of outcomes centered around the expectation of their strategy versus all other strategies at the table. Every player has variance in their results, we can show this with any number of trivial examples. And unfortunately in poker, the magnitude of the standard deviation tends to be much greater than the magnitude of expected profit over small samples. But as sample size grows, standard deviation (or randomness/luck) divided by the number of hands shrinks to zero.

 

[MikeyLSU]

there is no doubt there is skill involved.

I would say about 75% skill, 25% luck.

No one person can win all the time. But with good enough skill, you can put yourself in a position to win at a decent rate.

I promise you if you take one of the pros and sit them at a table with 9 random people in this thread to play poker, they will win the tournament 75%+ of the time.

Hell, in my home game, I consistantly win or place second in well over half of the games we play. Luck can not account for that.

 

[Capt Caveman]

fwiw - the California Supreme Court has ruled poker as a game of skill

 

[wheresmybacon]

There's a lot of luck, but over time the very skillful player can eliminate a good amount of that. The key there are the words "over time".

Playing a true noob can be pretty difficult. Playing someone who has at least a little knowledge is much easier IMO.

We had a guy @ our house games who would get completely hammered and pride himself on the saying "any two cards boys!!!". He would play anything and call anything with nothing. He'd usually get bounced very early, but one time I remember he took me out and several others and ended up cashing. He didn't know the hands or the cards, didn't know if a flush beat a three of a kind or couldn't tell you what a gut shot was. I remember on this particular run he called my aces with like a deuce-five offsuit then hit running cards to make a straight. He did the same thing to several others.

But for every one time he does something like that there are 20 times where he loses all his money in the first 10 minutes of the tourney.

 

[soulcougher73]

It is both obviously. "Luck of the draw" ring a bell? But you have to know what you are doing as well.

 

[Juked07]

There's a lot of luck, but over time the very skillful player can eliminate a good amount of that. The key there are the words "over time".

Playing a true noob can be pretty difficult. Playing someone who has at least a little knowledge is much easier IMO.

We had a guy @ our house games who would get completely hammered and pride himself on the saying "any two cards boys!!!". He would play anything and call anything with nothing. He'd usually get bounced very early, but one time I remember he took me out and several others and ended up cashing. He didn't know the hands or the cards, didn't know if a flush beat a three of a kind or couldn't tell you what a gut shot was. I remember on this particular run he called my aces with like a deuce-five offsuit then hit running cards to make a straight. He did the same thing to several others.

But for every one time he does something like that there are 20 times where he loses all his money in the first 10 minutes of the tourney.

I think your last two paragraphs disproved your claim in the second. Yes, it is hard to place a player like that on a hand, and in that case it is difficult to play exactly correctly against his particular hand. But we never play against a particular hand anyway. Given a set of information (and you have fairly complete information on this player as an example), we are only informed of a probability distribution of the hands an opponent can hold. Knowing that a player uniformly holds any possible hand is great. It makes it easy to have very good expectation against him. Of course there is variance, but the correct play is ridiculously easy to find (generally just aggressive with strong hands, get out with very weak). And the fact that he busts 20/21 times demonstrates that he is free money at the table.

EDIT: And I don't mean to pick on your post. I just wanted to emphasize that poker inherently has variance, but that we should make decisions facing this variance to maximize the expected value of our result. Even in cases where there is a great deal of uncertainty (player can have any two cards for Christ's sake), we can secure a great deal of expectancy. How does this relate to far more imprecise terms such as "skill" and "luck" I don't really know. Who gives a shit? We should just understand the game as it is, and subjective terms like "luck" really aren't that relevant.

Poker is simply a process with a mean and standard deviation, maybe even some skew and kurtosis. It doesn't need to be treated as anything different. Why aren't people asking the same thing about investing in your 401k? It has a mean and standard deviation underlying it as well.

 

[QueBert]

I agree. What other "sport" has it's championship games filled with a majority of amateur players? To me the abundance of amateurs in major events proves there is more luck than skill involved.

The WSOP event will have something like 15,000 people enter it this year, that's the only reason the final table's filled with non pros. It's more skill than luck, but when the armature's out number the pros 1,000 to 1 sometimes skill isn't enough. If you started a tournament that was 4 tables of amateurs and 4 tables of pros. I would be surprised if there was a single amateur at the final table. And in a heads up game of a pro vs a non pro I'd bet on the pro every time, sure I'd get loses occasionally if I did this, but 95/100 games I'd come out ahead.

A few years ago, maybe 4, the guy who won the WSOP was an amateur. The story as I heard it was he went crazy at the casinos in the high stakes room and lost all his winnings in a matter of 2 days. It was over a million dollars, where a pro like Ivey or Brunson can consistently win money.

 

[TheVrolok]

The WSOP event will have something like 15,000 people enter it this year, that's the only reason the final table's filled with non pros. It's more skill than luck, but when the armature's out number the pros 1,000 to 1 sometimes skill isn't enough. If you started a tournament that was 4 tables of amateurs and 4 tables of pros. I would be surprised if there was a single amateur at the final table. And in a heads up game of a pro vs a non pro I'd bet on the pro every time, sure I'd get loses occasionally if I did this, but 95/100 games I'd come out ahead.

A few years ago, maybe 4, the guy who won the WSOP was an amateur. The story as I heard it was he went crazy at the casinos in the high stakes room and lost all his winnings in a matter of 2 days. It was over a million dollars, where a pro like Ivey or Brunson can consistently win money.

This.

 

[BeauJangles]

You didn't answer the question.
So is the stock market skill or luck?

If what you say is true in comparing poker to the stock market, then I will say both but mostly skill.

I've never played poker since I had it on my TI-83+ calculator in 200-2002.
I wouldn't know how to play poker today if someone asked me to.

There is some luck involved on individual hands, but skill is what allows people to consistently win.

Also, the stock market isn't luck. Not today's market at least.

 

[BeauJangles]

The WSOP event will have something like 15,000 people enter it this year, that's the only reason the final table's filled with non pros. It's more skill than luck, but when the armature's out number the pros 1,000 to 1 sometimes skill isn't enough. If you started a tournament that was 4 tables of amateurs and 4 tables of pros. I would be surprised if there was a single amateur at the final table. And in a heads up game of a pro vs a non pro I'd bet on the pro every time, sure I'd get loses occasionally if I did this, but 95/100 games I'd come out ahead.

A few years ago, maybe 4, the guy who won the WSOP was an amateur. The story as I heard it was he went crazy at the casinos in the high stakes room and lost all his winnings in a matter of 2 days. It was over a million dollars, where a pro like Ivey or Brunson can consistently win money.

Yeah.

Also, if you ever watch it people make the most ridiculous calls just because a Pro is involved. It's stuff they'd never do otherwise, but they are enticed by the possibility of knocking out someone famous. A no-name guy doesn't get ganged up on.