so? that just means that there is skill involved in pai gow (and craps, and blackjack), not that there isn't in poker.

...

David, this is just my short take on why poker is a predominantly game of skill. I have a bachelors in math so this is a bit more applicable and easier to understand for me. If we were to take two players and force them all in dark every hand neither would have an edge. But lets say one of the players begins to start folding hands that have pretty much no shot in hell of being best, say 32o and 42o. Then, over time, over a VERY long period of time, that one players +EV move begins to accumulate a small advantage over the other player. By definition, skill is the ability of one player to make a unreciprocated(the opponent doesnt match it) positive expected value play over time.

Showing an application of something to be skill-based doesn't mean the game itself is such. E.g 'My opponent is folding every hand therefore I win every time,' tells us nothing about the game itself.

Zizek showed an application that the game was necessarily decided by skill whereby two players have no edge over each other. This is an interesting point.

Take for example a 'perfect' game of rock, paper, scissors. Two players know exactly what the other is thinking therefore the game has no start. In poker, if two players were at this skill level then the game would be about playing against the deck and not each other; of course making it a game of luck. To quote Zizek: "This can only be offset if your opponents make mistakes that you don't." And exploiting mistakes isn't a skill since it's more of an 'anti-skill' and your profits are randomly determined and dependent on the frequency of your opponents' mistakes.

Also, David: "commonsensically?" Really?

So are all games that don't draw a game of luck?

Wat

edit: woops, looks like you got responses. didn't see pg4

That post by ike is awesome, btw.

Not sure zizek is someone I'd be quoting since he's made a lot of ridiculous claims in this thread. In a skill game with any chance component, the outcome between two theoretically evenly-matched opponents will always be determined by the chance element. That is not to say such a game is a game of chance. In fact, that would be an incredibly dumb thing to say.

A good player who plays against a novice will win at rock paper scissors more often than a player who isn't good.

Regulate and legalize as a "skillful" gambling sport, amirite?

I believe on the importance of an eyeball test. With poker, it is assumed by those outside the tight-nit, incestuous poker community that poker is a game of skill.

To the rest of the world, it is called gambling.

When it comes to a game of baseball, even though the skill gap between the very best teams and the very worst teams at the highest tier is very small, it is generally accepted as a game of skill, and skill determines who wins in the long run.

And then the playoffs comes around, and the best team RARELY wins.

So who is correct? Is baseball really a game of skill if in the end the best team doesn't necessarily win? How about football?

If the difference between the two points of view is so small that only peer-reviewed dissertations are useful in the argument, then the question is one more of ideology than science or mathematics.

Poker in the short term is the SAME GAME as poker in the long term, yet people in the poker community always want to ignore that.

To recap my three main points.

1. The degree of skill in any game should compare an expert to an average player, not a very good one.

2. For a session to be predomiately skill, it is only necessary that the expert has a 75% chance (when both are playing normally) to outperform the average player.

3. In a ring game the key point should be whether the expert is 75% to outperform the average player holding the same cards. He need not have a 75% chance to be winner.

You don't think that an expert holding the same cards as a kithchen table player is at least 75% to be doing better agasinst the same field after four hours? The other esrtimates aren't worth arguing about.

I can make up arbitrary rules too (and then make up ridiculous numbers afterwards so that my arbitrary rules result in the outcome that I wanted). That doesn't make them at all valid.

ike's point about the predominantly skill argument is the only reasonable opinion on this issue. It's not a well-defined question, and pretending otherwise is stupid.

Edit:

1) I still don't think the question is well-defined. (Not because it can't be, but because you haven't bothered to.)

2) Who cares? You're making up arbitrary rules and then making arbitrary definitions and then pretending that some fact is obvious to conclude that your set of arbitrary rules and arbitrary definitions together with your falsely obvious fact answer an ill-formed question.

3) No... I don't.

Theoretically speaking, maybe. But how about to Johnny Comelately who just wants to sit down for a few hours once a year when he goes to Vegas? And he wins every time? We're quickly leaving theoretical territory and finding our way in reality.

What if there are no experts at the table? Sounds like the game is one big free-for all. How many experts are actually out there, a could hundred? A couple thousand? So why is the game of poker being framed to suit a definition which only suits professionals capitalizing off of fish? Sounds awful arbitrary, Mr Sklansky.

In baseball, professional baseball is at the highest tiers played between the most skilled in the world. The distinction is clear. In poker it's not and almost never is.

I have no idea what you are talking about. Meanwhile, what's ike's point?

ike's post:

Using the definition "skill predominates if there is a greater than a 75% chance that an expert holding the sme cards will outperform an average player with after a few hours" is a comom sense definition that will help the cause of poker players if it is accepted. That's really all I have to say.

OP was an enjoyable read & several nice replies but this one not getting enough love IMO.

I think the most important quantity in poker, or any form of gambling is "edge." Successful gamblers have knack for gauging their edge.

For experienced poker players, it doesn't take very long after sitting at a new table to determine their rank in the pecking order. The fishiest players always put themselves near the top, and are most often wrong.

Win rate is a small factor in determining your edge in a particular game. Many, many players with great win rates took their shot in Vegas or LA and promptly went busto. IMO, their problem is most often thinking they have a positive edge against players who are better than them.

It would be nice to develop a rating system, like the Elo rankings in chess where a player could know what they're up against. But that defeats one of the most profitable aspects of poker, which is fleecing the unsuspecting.

wat

I agree (except for the bit about luck evening out). Unfortunately, I don't think it helps the cause that is being promoted here, and in fact it may even hinder it.

We have to remember that judges know law and politicians know politics. Even if we were to assume that judges and politicians were completely impartial (an optimistic assessment to say the least), arguments that make immediate sense to poker players won't necessarily make any sense to judges and politicians.

In my opinion, there is very little chance that the laws which relate to poker will actually be passed by people who understand poker (not just in the US, but anywhere).

Therefore, I think we are better off making simple and practical arguments that are easy for 'laypeople' to understand, and looking for glaring weaknesses and obvious counterpoints to those arguments, instead of getting bogged down in the technicalities.

The article on the Freakonomics paper in the Huffington Post has a quote I'm slightly uncomfortable with,

"even excluding the highly-skilled "Main Event,""

I may be completely wrong but doesn't luck play a larger factor in this tournament due to the larger field size, even the higher skilled players are going to need to survive a higher number of all-ins and marginal spots. Wouldn't looking at the chances of a rank amateur in the $50k players championship (prob not many but must be a few millionaires in there) be a better scale for looking at how skill can make a difference?

Couldn't someone write a poker simulation program like the one from this site. That way you eliminate any variance that an average player might have over an expert player and prove how much of a skill edge there is in poker.

great, thanks for that david

Just because the same can be said about blackjack doesn't make it less true for either. Poker is all skill just as blackjack is all skill long-term. Anything with a skill element is 100% skill long term because the luck element negates itself.

The key difference between poker and other casino games that involve skill is that a skilled poker player will eventually be profitable. This is only problematic in the sense that the game has to be beatable in terms of rake etc. Otherwise the skill vs. luck argument really is as meaningless as it is with blackjack.

Isn't the assignment of white/black determined by a coin flip? Between players with identical strategies, the winner of a chess game is completely random (assuming the unknown solution to chess is "white wins" or "black wins", rather than "draw"). Chess can be replaced with any symmetric strategy game. Your argument suggests that all such games are games of luck.

I see that a few others have beaten me to this.


As far as approaches to predominance go, David's seems pretty reasonable as far as convincing laymen. One issue is that the classification of the game changes dynamically as the player population changes. Various forms of poker might be a game of skill today, but, in a hypothetical future where everyone who plays poker has become much better at it, the average player might play well enough such that the expert only has a 70% probability.

This again brings us to the issues raised by the above paradox. Any empirical approach to measuring skill/chance based on results of actual real-life gameplay will fail for any game where players' strategies are sufficiently close to each other. Poker games which were skill under this measure would cease to be skill if all of its players started playing much more skillfully.

Whatever the predominance test really "is", I'd say that an ideal property would be that it returns the same result regardless of the particular population that chooses to play the game at any given time. Skill-ness should be an inherent property of a game. So perhaps we need some framework for establishing a dummy "average player" for any given game. Maybe take a random person who has never played before and give them X hours of training?

The last few pages have been talking about cash games, i presume. What if poker were to be compared with a tennis tournament?
Eg. 10k poker players in WSOP vs 10k tennis pros in tournaments, would a "Chris Moneymaker" in Tennis (read:amateur) be able to achieve what he did? Sorry I'm pretty bad at examples