Poker is mostly a game of skill. Think about it like a video game. Some video games have a "critical strike" system, in which doing something a certain way, or the roll of a dice, etc, determines when you get a critical strike, say critical strikes do 3x damage to your opponent in whatever game. Now let's say you have a 30% chance to critically strike. Your opponent also has a 30% chance. Now let's say you win 78% of your matches against your opponent, over a very large sample size. On your last match, you won by taking all his HP at once with chain critical strikes, while your poor, lesser skilled opponent got very few, if any critical strikes. Did you win your last match through luck? Probably, but you still do two things better than your opponent, based on the data. You are able to minimize the effect when your opponent gets more crits than you, and you are also able to maximize the effectiveness when you get more crits than your opponent. This is the exact same way poker works. There isn't exactly x amount of skill and x amount of luck involved. The skill is minimizing your losses when you're beat, and maximizing your winnings when you win. If you can do that, then the "luck" doesn't matter, because you're always losing less when you lose, and winning more when you win, on average, than your opponent.

Not sure I can agree that skill plays 0% role when you are requiring that they are using skill. If a player didn't maintain that same amount of skill, then they would lose more, right? I would say that the skill being used at the table is still having an influence over how much money moves where.

I think he means if you somehow had 2 perfectly matched opponents, then neither would have an advantage over the other, and the outcome of any particular number of hands would be determined completely by luck.

In NLHE and LMHE
Pummi81, How long is the long run in a live/online game in hours?
RustyB, Luck's defination: Success or failure apparently brought by chance rather than through one's own actions.
The question is on an average, how much skill do you need(range of 100%) to be a profitable player. For instance, you are not getting any cards in a long day session or a week of a session(you are being unlucky), but you are still beating the game. OTOH, you are getting good cards, but getting bad beats, eventhough, you played and put money in pot the best way you could. What is the % of this effecting you to be a profitable player. If we were to flip coins its 100% luck correct? Either of us has a chance of winning 50-50 to be a winning player in a coin flip you would need a luck factor of 1% which means you win 51% and other player loses 49% of the time. To see this 1% difference you would need to coin flip for a long time, however if it was 10% of you being lucky you would see it alot faster. This just came to me out of no where. Pocket aces will lose to ATC appx. 13% of the time! even, and AK vs JJ pre flop almost a coin flip. You are the best player in the world, you know JJ is slighty winner than AK, so you want this guy to go all in or put as much as chips in the pot before he goes all in, you call, in this given situation how much was it skill that you knew this guy had AK range and how much was it luck this guy calling you, and also that losing with JJ to AK on river. It would be pretty complex to calculate the exact amount, and I just wanted to know the estimate...

so it's like coin flipping and the luck would determine who would be the winner... so if 2 players has mathed skill it would be a coin flip poker and the luckier one will win... and there is no way of guessing or measuring that luck... therefore it's 100% luck - the rake, thus both players are losers in the long run

Dunno about live poker or poo-flinging.
Basically all experience I have with live poker is playing in one major NLHE tournament.
Which bored me to death, The combination of slow pace of live play and in general mind-numbing tournament play, yeeesh.

Online, depends on the type of game and amount of tables you play obv.

6-max NLHE, 10 tbls for an hour is ~600-1000 hands.

Let's say on avg. 750 hands/hour.

I consider long run, I dunno, 10 million hands?

10000000/750 = 13333 hours.

So, try playing for example 2 hours every day for 18 years and I believe your results will be close to where they should be based on your decision-making capabilities or skill advantage/disadvantage vs other players on the table.

I guess it's the same with live, too. But live you get in, what, 25 hands/hour?
So 10000000/25 = 40000 hours.
2 hours every day for 548 years.

Counting out the skill differences and how much one plays, the skill plays a minor role in poker and at the toughest levels it's almost only luck, the skill making a small difference compared to the skill level of the opponents, but still if thinking it a lifetime hobby at that or at any tough level, the skill would dominate.

It's difficult to make a ruling based on those facts as it's hard to decide where to draw the line. Where would I draw the line? In live casinos, I would draw the line to average players and say it's so much luck that it's a game of luck there. But online the case is in my opinion different and I would make it a game of skill there, but that's just my view into it (enough winning players having put enough hours in to know it's a game of skill there) and it's kind of bizarre.

That's exactly what I was responding to.

Yes. The point is that the proportion of the poker game results that can be attributed to skill likely changes from session to session and that it depends on the difference in skill of the players. The greater the difference in skill among players, the more that skill rather than luck influences the outcome. So when people ask how much of poker is due to skill versus luck, the best answer is that it depends on the game conditions. There are conditions where player skill could determine 90% of the results. This could happen in the case of experienced player who is playing a beginner or he is playing someone who is alcohol-impaired. In those cases the skill difference could be large that the more skilled player would be expected to be ahead after only ten hands or so.

Per hand winrate of a solid player 0.1bb/h sd 10bb/h. So 0.1 vs 10 or skill 1% of typical result!!!

Every 10000 hands though winrate 1000bb sd 1000bb so 50% skill 50% luck

Every 1mil hands winrate 100000bb sd 10000bb luck almost irrelevant.


But change the winrate to 0.01bb/hand and at about 1M hands its still pretty much important to be lucky. So a borderline profitable player will almost never be unconstrained to his/her luck for many years. The good ones know already from the first few months luck will not matter in their lives if they play responsibly.


Bottom line for the strong player after 1 mil hands its almost unthinkable for luck to alter the outcome of winning to losing. Even if the above numbers are crude they give you the right way to see this. You compare what you expect to win vs the volatility and if the expected is comparable to volatility then you need to get 1sd unlucky and worse to lose (~16%). But notice luck still determines how satisfied you are with the outcome or not. At 100k hands or 1 mil hands luck can kiss my a$$ lol!!! Its irrelevant if good.

However notice that if one applies a very risky bankroll management method luck can be the difference between one player simply satisfied with their game and grinding an income with too much effort vs same skill now playing for millions after 2-3 years. Absolutely the big names you see are superlucky and nobody can convince me otherwise. You are simply observing the best talent and best luck combined, not the best talent and bad or mediocre lifetime luck. This is crystal clear. Most of the winners are lucky and irresponsible early on together with good. But really being good is inevitable if smart and analytical if forced to play millions of hands. Come on now! So luck allows you to get up there fast and forces you to learn fast. It pretty much determines who will have it easy on the rise to the top.

All the new age internet miracle kids are superlucky on the way to the top overall. After of course they are established eventually luck evens out but its too late for them to lose typically having already built a lot on experience and life lessons and bankroll.

I like this answer better than all, thanks.

So people can ask stupid/unanswerable questions like this but I can't legitly ask for someone to talk theory with? I don't understand what makes you decide to close a legit thread regarding poker theory (where else am I supposed to put my question?), but yet allow rhetorical questions like this to fly.

No offense op.

LOL, why does everyone love to go off topic on the thread. It's simple thing to do, if you don't know the answer or do not want to answer or do not be involded, do not click on thread, simple as that. No reason to troll, rustyb 2p2should give a fraction to everyone who goes off topic, if they would like to chat, they should start a chat thread or else where. It is annoying to see 100+ pages and posts has nothing to do with the main subject of the thread. Thanks.

It's all luck and I'll explain why.

People say ''you have to play through the variance to even it out'' (even out your run bad)

So I saw a graph on here the once which was a sample size of 3.x million hands and the guy was running massively below ev.

So, if we're to take his word for it which I do because he's a great player than he was running insanely bad. Then it goes to show that not everyone who plays poker or ever plays it would ever be able to play 3million hands in there lifetime of playing. So therefore it is plausible to run bad for your entire time whilest playing poker. Because unless your a 12 hour a day 24 hour tabling robot you're never gonna be able to play these millions of hands to break through variance.

Live poker is slow, you don't see as many hands as you do online and you can't possibly multi table live donkaments. So these people who ran like god or do run like god in there careers may very well be able to read the game great, make great calls and correct decisions. But if you hit them with a 2 outer for there first 3 million hands 8/10 times they'd be un-known busto's, and it's simply the same for the people who run bad. If they had avoided the 59% of there 2/1 outers/ sick insane runner runners than they'd be successful.

I really think the game is flawed the randomness and luck element is huge. And people saying playing sample sizes and huge amounts doesn't mean anything. Because like I said if you can run bad over 3 million hands at a certain point, then what about these people who are only ever going to play 3 mill hands in there entire playing career? It's possible for them too start out on a complete run bad which could last 'forever'

Flame away, but no one ever thinks about it like this. But I'm pretty such I've touched upon something here.

The fact that there exists someone who has experienced negative variance over huge lengths of time does not imply that poker is "all" or even "mostly" luck. There is no limit to how much variance you can encounter, this is obvious from any basic study of probability and statistics. However, the worse variance is, the less likely it is, and the less people will encounter it. It is very easy to describe how likely various levels of negative (or positive) variance are. Learn these skills and your post above will no longer make much sense to you.

Slipnslide - this isn't a place to post threads looking for people to talk offline with. The OP is an issue of poker theory, even if it isn't a particularly illuminating or interesting one to all people. As such, people need to remain civil within the thread.