Is poker a game of chance or skill?

http://www.math.tau.ac.il/~nogaa/PDFS/skill4.pdf

by quilby • 16 years ago

12 41 16 years ago

math.tau.ac.il

tptacek8• 16 years ago

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.

ThomPete10• 16 years ago

Wouldn't that mean that it is a game both of skill and of luck?

tptacek8• 16 years ago

In much the same sense as stock market investing is "luck": randomness is present, but you're provided extensive tools to mitigate its impact.

ErrantX• 16 years ago

In a wider sense yes.

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

Natsu• 16 years ago

I think the better question is how much of each? 50/50 is a lot different than 70/30, but I wonder if there's any good way to measure it?

After all, like so many games, the random variation can mask the effects of skill and you can only measure your skill relative to that of your opponents (so a good player against newbies might destroy them, while a superb player against good ones might only get a little ahead).

gte910h• 16 years ago

It's actually both. A game of chance is one is which outcomes are mostly/strongly based on...chance. A game of skill is one in which skill is an influencer on the results. Poker is both.

Apreche• 16 years ago

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 in which there is no luck factor. No matter the relative skills of the players, the most skilled player will win. For example, boxing is a game of skill. Poker is not. Two grand masters of poker playing against each other, the result will be determined by the cards. They might as well play Candy Land instead.

ThomPete10• 16 years ago

Exactly. Chess is another example.

tspiteri• 16 years ago

There is a good article about luck in chess here: http://www.chessninja.com/migonchess/migonchess005.htm

To quote a bit:

There is no "chance" on the chessboard, the pieces don't move by themselves. ... However, "extraordinarily improbable" things happen all the time.

dazzawazza• 16 years ago

I think you are forgetting the element of psychology that enters in to poker.

While it's true that all the top players understand the odds equally well there are some players that are still considered better poker players as their ability to read other players is better tuned. That's the skill element.

michael_dorfman• 16 years ago

They might as well be playing Candyland? Not really.

The luck of the cards tends to even out over time-- this is why tournaments consist of a large number of hands.

I'm not sure of the specific numbers with Poker, but an expert Cribbage player tends to win about 55% of the time.

yurisagalov2• 16 years ago

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 hands/tournaments/sessions, the better player WILL converge to be a winner. The margin by which he is a winner will be determined by his skill.

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).

ThomPete10• 16 years ago

Wouldn't that would mean an accumulation of grand masters that would then by an large win all tournaments in the long run. Is that in fact what is happening?

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.

aquateen4• 16 years ago

Just because there is an element of chance doesn't mean it's not a "true" game of skill. Sites like pokertableratings.com and sharkscope.com keep track of cash and tournament winnings, and maybe 100k hands gives a good sample that overcomes variance.

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.

tansey5• 16 years ago

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 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?

ThomPete10• 16 years ago

It is much more so than chess.

aquateen4• 16 years ago

I am not sure how you quantify toughness, but this is the worst use of "orders of magnitude" I've ever seen.

More so, since I have spent a nontrivial percentage of my life playing both games.

tptacek8• 16 years ago

There is luck involved in boxing. There is much less luck involved in boxing than there is in poker, because poker is a game that is about managing risk and uncertainty.

Chess and Go may be "pure skill" games, but there are very few popular games, sports, and practices that are similarly pure, and so the notion of how valuable or important "skill" versus "luck" is becomes murky.

wake_up_sticky• 16 years ago

Imagining games to have a "skill component" and a "luck component" is the wrong way to conceptualize games which involve randomness. A much better way conceptualize these games is to consider how many "units" (games, matches, hands, tournaments, whatever) must be played before the distribution of players by (score/place/points) becomes indistinguishable from that expected based on the players' ability levels.

For instance, if a GM rated 2800 plays a GM rated 2700, he may lose. In fact, he may lose several games in a row. However, if the two play a 30-game match, the probability that the 2700-rated player will win is very low.

Now, if you take the best heads up no limit hold em player in the world and have him play a series of hands against the hundredth-best heads up no limit hold em player in the world, he may very well lose the first hand. He may very well be down after the first thousand hands. But if they play, say, 1,000,000 hands, the probability that the weaker player will be up on the stronger player is as low as, if not lower than, the probability that the 2700 will beat the 2800 in their match.

It's not about "skill" versus "luck"--the question is simply, "How many (hands/games/matches/etc.) must be played before the probability that the weaker player (has won/is ahead/etc.) becomes sufficiently small?

Is poker a game of chance or skill?

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