Quote:
Originally Posted by kamikaze baby
Well zizek's post confuses the argument by introducing a lot of entirely irrelevant distractions.
Suppose I pay $10 to enter a competition with 9 other people. The competition will consist of 20 strenuous multiplication questions, and whoever performs the greatest number of calculations correctly within 3 minutes wins $30. About this contest:
* this is clearly a game of skill. No one would be able to perform these calculations correctly by luck;
* the fact that this game is heavily raked has nothing to do with whether it is a game of skill or a game of luck;
* if I complete 16 of the calculations correctly and win the competition, then I have profited off the mistakes of others, since the other competitors must have made at least 5 mistakes each. The fact that I can profit off others' mistakes has nothing to do with whether the game is one of skill or one of luck.
Finally, if game theory optimal strategies exist in a given contest, that is evidence that there is skill involved in the contest - for one thing, it implies that there are strategic choices to the game. So if game theory optimal strategies exist in poker, that does not support the claim that poker is based on luck.
You're missing the point entirely. If everyone played poker optimally then the outcome would only be decided by chance. You say the fact that optimal play exists means that it's skillful and strategic, I say optimal strategy exists for quite possibly every mainstream gambling game in existence. In roulette I could bet black and red simultaneously. In blackjack I could double down on 20. In pai gow I could always play my two lowest cards up front. These are all suboptimal plays that vastly increase the edge the casino would otherwise have.*
In a poker tournament with a 10% rake, your longterm expectation is a -10% ROI. This can only be offset if your opponents make mistakes that you don't. Whereas in other casino games, this edge would be passed along to the casino, in poker that edge is passed along to other players. This is the only thing that distinguishes poker from the other aforementioned gambling games. Optimal strategy in most poker variants is so abstract that mistakes are abundant, but mistakes are abundant in other gambling games too.
In fact the last paragraph of your post really reflects how much you're missing this point, because to actually prove poker is a game of skill you would have to prove that GTO strategy
doesn't exist because only then could the longterm outcome be decided by creative faculty. The fact that GTO strategy hasn't been fully fleshed out for most poker variants is irrelevant because its existence can be assumed to exist, as a perfect game of chess can be assumed to exist.
And to preempt the obvious response that "well chess must not be a game of skill under that definition", the difference is that in the perfect game of chess, a certain player (probably white) is ALWAYS going to win, whereas at a table with 6 people playing perfect poker, the winner would be completely random.
*Technically speaking I know the roulette example actually doesn't, so I'll just cop out and say that that betting strategy is worse because you're betting twice as much. Yeah, that's it.
Last edited by zizek; 11-15-2011 at 01:56 AM.