http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22892961

http://neuroskeptic.blogspot.co.uk/2...h+-+All+Topics)

I lol'd - the best part about this is the main way they sorted the groups, and the fact they ignored the Dunning-Kruger effect...

Also, check out the publication history of the 'researchers'; bias anybody?

Mega-retarded study.

Once I won 26 straight hands of BJ in a row flat betting $25. Had I gambled like I did when I was ignorant and stupid at the same time, I would have wiped out the dealers box -- $500k.

The difference being, now after hand #27 I walk off with an extra 25 $25 chips. Then, after hand #27 I would have walked off with nothing but a great story to tell.

In between those two paragraphs is the secret to gambling success.

Wow. There are some clueless "scientists" out there. Asking people if they're "experts" is how they get their expert group, lol. Hard to believe any actual thought went into that study.

Another huge factor: At least in the abstract, they don't tell you anything about how they selected the hands and boards.

If you have control over the cards that come out -- and it appears they did -- it would be easy to select hands that disadvantage the "experts" by letting the fish suck out.

It can't be much of a 'study' if they themselves call it 'Quasi-Experimental.'

And it had this:

while playing about 1000 hands of poker did seem to lead to the development of skill, the majority of online players had much less experience than that, so were at the mercy of chance.

That seems to refute their own premise.

So in conclusion:

Some people think they are good at poker. But in reality they aren't.

Shocking news!

All Quasi-Experimental means is that they did not have experimental control over who was put into what group. In other words, they did not randomly assign people to be good or bad poker players.

I'm thinking that most likely this is just something that some grad students did because they were interested in poker and wanted to come up with a project that would be more fun than some other boring project. They were probably hoping to show that poker was a game of skill, but the data from their small sample didn't support that.