11–20 of 42 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In much the same sense as stock market investing is "luck": randomness is present, but you're provided extensive tools to mitigate its impact.
So it's both luck and skills.
Short summary, for anyone who already knows the basics of poker: yes, the cards are random, but everyone's bets are a function of their statistical competance and their ability to make inferences from other people's bets, and therefore poker is a game of skill. It's a fine article but it appears to contain very little new insight.
Wouldn't that mean that it is a game both of skill and of luck?
But to a set of skilled poker players the value of the cards are relatively immaterial; they will play the averages and the other players.
One of my friends (a hardened player) once put it like this:
The cards are simply there to settle those times when players call bluffs to the end
This article is correct, mathematically, from what I can tell. However, the author seems to not understand the meaning of skill. Apparently to the author a skilled player is one who knows and plays all the odds correctly whereas an unskilled player plays randomly, or sub-optimally. If all players are equally knowledgeable of all the probabilities involved, then the game is a game of luck. A true game of skill is one…
Prior to focusing primarily on startups and entrepreneurship, I spent a lot of time playing a lot of online poker. I've put in close to a million hands over a few years at the micro/small stakes, and I've seen bad beats, I've had bad beats, I've put on bad beats, which can all be attributed to "luck", and the swings of the day can be attributed to luck, but over the entire life time of my game, you can certainly see gradual improvement that can be attributed to skill.
When we look at televised tournament poker (not shows like Poker After Dark / High Stakes Poker, where the players need only to have the sufficient buy in and/or be invited to participate), it is not particularly surprising to see the same "grandmasters" (or pros, or whatever oyu want to call them) appear over and over again. Yes, they don't win every tournament, or every hand, or every session, but in the long term, they do win (assuming they don't start playing poorly).
This article is correct, mathematically, from what I can tell. However, the author seems to not understand the meaning of skill. Apparently to the author a skilled player is one who knows and plays all the odds correctly whereas an unskilled player plays randomly, or sub-optimally. If all players are equally knowledgeable of all the probabilities involved, then the game is a game of luck. A true game of skill is one…
Poker's become much tougher the last five years or so. Quite a few of the top players formerly played Starcraft, MvC2, Warcraft, backgammon, Magic the Gathering, chess, etc. at the highest levels.
That mentality does make the games profitable though.
This article is correct, mathematically, from what I can tell. However, the author seems to not understand the meaning of skill. Apparently to the author a skilled player is one who knows and plays all the odds correctly whereas an unskilled player plays randomly, or sub-optimally. If all players are equally knowledgeable of all the probabilities involved, then the game is a game of luck. A true game of skill is one…
Poker is a MUCH tougher game (dozens of orders of magnitude, depending on the variant) than chess. We have no idea how close to optimal any human is at the game. Similarly, computer opponents can only play well in very limited settings like heads-up, fixed-limit Hold'em, where the game tree is a reasonable size.
Also, it depends on the period of time that you're looking at. If two people play a single hand, it's almost entirely luck. However, as the paper argues (though again in a simplistic way), as the number of iterations increases, the CLT comes into play and skill wins out.
This is true, even for "grand masters" in poker. Tom Dwan has an open challenge to play him in 50,000 hands online. If his opponent is ahead after 50,000 hands, he will pay them an additional $1M. He's not doing this because he loves to gamble. He's doing it because he knows 50K hands are a sufficient sample size to significantly reduce the luck factor.
Do you think a game like backgammon is also luck?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, just like baseball, gymnastics, golf, skeet shooting, and jet travel.
Hardly a proper comparison.
This article is correct, mathematically, from what I can tell. However, the author seems to not understand the meaning of skill. Apparently to the author a skilled player is one who knows and plays all the odds correctly whereas an unskilled player plays randomly, or sub-optimally. If all players are equally knowledgeable of all the probabilities involved, then the game is a game of luck. A true game of skill is one…
That's not exactly correct. Poker is a game of probabilities, which means that it has built in varience, which people call "luck". In a game of poker where two "grand masters of poker" play againt each other in a vacuum (i.e. one tournament, or one hand, or whatever you want), the result may be determined by the cards alone. HOWEVER, as is the nature of varience and probability, given a sufficiently large sample of h…
Gus isn't winning every tournament. That might be due to the fact of other better players entering the game. But if your theory is correct wouldn't it mean that the more you play the better you become?
It would seem to me that a game where so much information is hidden from you and that information was randomly distributed luck is a bigger part than skill.
This article is correct, mathematically, from what I can tell. However, the author seems to not understand the meaning of skill. Apparently to the author a skilled player is one who knows and plays all the odds correctly whereas an unskilled player plays randomly, or sub-optimally. If all players are equally knowledgeable of all the probabilities involved, then the game is a game of luck. A true game of skill is one…
I agree that the paper makes some naive assumptions. However, you seem to be equating poker to chess, which is a common but erroneous analogy. Poker is a MUCH tougher game (dozens of orders of magnitude, depending on the variant) than chess. We have no idea how close to optimal any human is at the game. Similarly, computer opponents can only play well in very limited settings like heads-up, fixed-limit Hold'em, where…