IMO a game with a higher possible Sharpe ratio would be "more skill" based (Sharpe ratio = winrate/stddev). Now, in a perfect world where PLO or NLHE (or any other game) has been completely solved (everybody is playing GTO), the highest possible sharpe ratio would be 0. But we are not living in this world, therefore there is still skill in those games. A "game" such flipping a fair coin cannot in any circumstance have a positive sharpe ratio, so it's just luck.

What is the "highest possible Sharpe ratio" of a game? No one knows, but It's a function of the current level of understanding of the game rather than the game itself (although the complexity/difficulty of the game itself affects how easy it is to understand/solve).

edit: In a perfect world where everyone's playing GTO NLHE, NLHE's sharpe ratio would be 0, but some might argue that you still need a lot of "skill" to play GTO NLHE. IMO skill is relative: Someone is skilled if he's doing something better than others (or the average person). If everybody is doing it, people will no longer consider that a skill. For example, adult humans don't consider knowing how to walk on 2 feet "a skill", although it would be a skill for, say, dogs.

Am I the only one who thinks this post is stupid? I'm just a breakeven donk stuck in the micros so maybe im the idiot but idk. Doesnt seem soulreading every hand is more skillful

Yeah for sure, my thoughts were aimed at your first post and trying to define the skill difference between games, I wasn't really thinking about variance. I'm guessing it would be 'fair' to say that a simpler poker game has less skill involved than a more complicated variant.

Regarding 2-7 SD specifically, I think Sauce would disagree with a bunch of posters ITT saying it's not very skillful. A quote from his blog, though I'm not entirely sure applicable theory equates to skill but whatever:

'I don't want to give too much strategy away, but I have never found a form of poker where game theoretic principals are more directly applicable, even with very deep stacks'

edit: Or maybe he just means that there are less intricacies in the actual game and therefore simple game theory principals are more useful, meaning that it's less skillful I have no idea

Thank you for saying what I meant far better than I did!

Cool discussion. Thanks for chiming in Isaac!

I think Kansas City Lowball is the most skilled form of poker simply because it requires and relies more on player intuition. Unlike flop games there is zero information and everything is hidden which makes position even more important than PLO. If anybody has played this game then you will know that you will face a big decision every couple hands, and it will usually be for most of your chips as the betting is big, really big. I also think there is far less variance, since most of the money goes in when way behind or way ahead. Unlike PLO where aggressive games can turn into flip fests. Learning opponents tendancies is also even more crucial, since any aggro monkey can shove a flush draw in holdem or plo and not be a big mistake, in 2-7 learning player tendancies is even more important since miscalculating a player's patting range can lead to a huge mistake with zero to very little equity unlike the aforementioned flush draw example.

I do play this game alot...however I only play .5/1 and I think it'd be far more useful to get some of the guys in the 'Draw and Other Poker' forum to chime in since they obv play much higher and can give us a better perspective on the discussion.

Wouldn't NLTD be more skillful than NLSD almost by definition?

probably, but its limit sooo.....

NLTD is certainly not limit hence the "NL" part

No. Less information = less skill involved.

Intuition (whatever that is supposed to mean) != skill

The more information there is in a game, the more aspects a player has to take into account and weigh. If there's more information available, the game is more complex, there's more things to consider while selecting your strategy, and more skill involved.

If less information and more "intuition" would mean it's a skill game, rock-paper-scissors would be more a skill game than super deep stacked PLO. Which it is not.

EDIT: And variance is completely separate issue from skill. You could make a graph with variance in X-axis and skill involved in Y-axis and plot every game on that.

why did ike say rock paper scissors has 0 variance?

whoever wins a game of rock paper scissors, did it because of variance imo

I don't think ike said that, but I actually don't think what you wrote is true, I mean for one they have a PSR world championship and strategy relating to the game etc. Obviously it's a simple game but perhaps they look at people who say it's all variance similar to how we look down at people who say poker is all luck.

Once in Thailand, a young girl (~10-13 y/o) came up to our table trying to sell us roses. I bought one off her and convinced her to play me for a long time PSRing for roses. I think I ended up taking like 12 off her over ~30 throws before she quit lol, and it wasn't just variance because she had no idea how to strategise (too young I guess) so I was picking up really obvious patterns and just owning (obv I had to run hot to win the first 2 though). Haha, I tried taking the roses around the marketplace and PSRing for other items to build my way up to something cool but they weren't having any of it, so I ended up giving the roses back to the girl

If I can pick apart some young girl's thought process like that, I'm sure some world championship regular could completely obliterate me over quite a few games. Even my old housemate had a sick read on me and would regularly crush me when PSRing for drinks etc. Cliffs, IMO there is skill in PSR

edit: Also jimpo kinda summed up the poker argument quite nicely

if i use a randomize program for rps shouldnt i have exactly 50% equity against the best player ever, and there is nothing he can do against it?

Yea, nobody can exploit you if you choose truly random actions. That wouldn't ever give you an edge though, and I think it's almost impossible for a human to actually randomise properly. I dunno, I just assume there's SOME reason behind having a world championship in the game besides it just being a fun game to play. Perhaps people just find the concept of randomising lame and they all just actively try to out-think each other, giving the better strategist an edge.

there's so much levelling and soulreading in rps... imo very similar to NL27SD

i am a pl draw player and im pretty sure that nl sd is probably a relatively easy game to solve though it would be easier if it was pot limit. triple draw seems a lot more complex. the edges should be relatively small unless people dont know the hand rankings.

edit: it is certainly not easy to solve, so is shortstack nl holdem, but you will come reasonably close quickly imo.

Even for a computer, it's hard.

What, really? I would have assumed it would be ridiculously easy to program a computer to make random decisions, I assume that's what you are saying is hard. Couldn't you just assign paper, scissor and rock an integer of 1,2 and 3 and then use some some function like int{rand}; or whatever and restrict the int to only be between 1 and 3?

edit: I haven't touched any programming except perl in over 2 years so I'm obviously a n00b, but I'm pretty sure in C I used 'random' functions all the time.....or did I just get levelled?


Sorry for derail

lol, you can't program randomness.

Random functions don't actually create something 'truly random'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_...random_numbers

I think that was his point.

Huh, fair enough. Guess I'm a programming fish (well I knew that already, but more than I thought). How would you program a coinflip simulator then, when you get down to the mechanics isn't it just a computer/program randomly choosing between 2 options? And if its not and has something to do with actual odds, couldn't you just change that to account for the number of options you're dealing with?

edit: Ok ty for the link frankinabox. The more you know...

Well, you say it's just to program something to choose between 2 options. How do you suppose anything, except for quantum mechanics, can be completely random? A computer works by you telling it what to do, if you tell it to choose something random you must have made a method for the computer to find something random, the making of this method is the hard(impossible?) part.

Yeah I definitely thought of this while I was posting, and initially I actually assumed the guy was saying computers couldn't make pseudo-random decisions so I was like wtf. My math experience is only the stuff in first year engineering so I'm not familiar with advanced math and I guess I just assumed with all the crazy theory people have come up with these days someone would have figured it out by now. My programming teachers also never bothered to talk about how 'randomness' was generated, unless I wasn't listening heh.

Either way I understand, derail over. Also I'm guessing that the 'random' algorithms would be good enough to program an essentially unexploitable scissor-paper-rock over anything less than 100 throws

It's really ****ed up how much my posting frequency on 2p2 goes up when I have an an exam the next day, fml

Jayp-AA & Gavz playing 1x 100/200 PLO. Jayp is the hottest thing on the poker scene atm.