hey, you seem to know a lot about this and have thoroughly studied the issue. Please define long term for me now, will you? Thanks man!

Wrong. There's a HUGE difference when the rake is 5% compared to an extreme of 99%. There has to be a GTO solution to ideal rake in order to limit risk. 0% is not profitable for the house and therefore the house has no incentive to offer a game, while 99% is not profitable to the player and offers no incentive to play. In essence, this is a competition between the house and the players.

The regulations in place are only geared to prevent the casino from taking too much from the players, they aren't designed with the beatability of the games in mind. A legislator might think "hey well rake is very high, but hourly player loss will be about the same as blackjack so who cares". I'm arguing that we need a second level of regulation to keep rake low and keep games beatable, so that decent players (not necessarily professionals) at least have a chance to be +EV against amateurs.

This will help legalization since if you have strict rules in place to ensure beatability (up to a reasonable point anyway), its easier to sell the idea that poker is a skill game and not gambling (or at least pure gambling). I know some states have legalized chess tournaments that you can play for money but don't have legalized gambling. If you treat poker more like chess you can maybe get carve outs where cardrooms are legal even if slot machines aren't.

That's a different question than the original one, which is at what point (if any) the rake turns poker into a game of chance. It's also a different question than asking at what point (if any) the take turns poker into a gambling game (assuming that there is some point at which it is not gambling). Your post conflated those two questions, and now it appears a third one too, which is what is the "game theory optimal" rake.

I'm not a game theory expert, but it seems that the GTO play for the house is to charge the rake that maximizes its own profits. If you're looking for a quantitative answer, that's impossible to provide because it depends upon, among other things, the clientele of any particular poker room, the amount of competition in the region, etc. This is more of an economics question than a game theory question (acknowledging that there is overlap). The GTO play for the player is to play at the card room at which the player has the highest EV, accounting for whatever the rake structure there is, or to not play at all if there is no +EV option.

In reality, card rooms seem to charge as much as they think they can get away with while keeping their games healthy (and thus keeping their regulars), and that is more of a trial-and-error/watch-and-evaluate approach than anything scientific, from what I can tell.

Regulations shouldn't be ensuring that games are "beatable". Whether a game is "beatable" or not depends mostly on the skill of the other players, and this is obviously not something the state is going to regulate.
Moreover, whether the game is "beatable" (in the sense of some players having a positive EV) has very little to do with whether something is a game of skill.

Something is a game of skill if some players have a different EV than other players based on the choices they make, regardless of whether any of those EVs are positive or negative.

I could be wrong on this but if the rake was the exact same as your win rate if your win rate was static, then wouldn’t that make your wins and losses only be sourced from variance making it gambling.

No, your WR would still depend on skill. And there are lots of small stakes games where rake exceeds the WR. This leads to rakeback leaches-imean regs...

I think he means if the rake equals exactly the winrate you would have if there was no rake.

So let's say you get to play without rake and achieve 10bb/100. Now the pokersite decides to rake at 10bb/100. You can assume that your winrate will now be break even and you'll only win and lose based on variance.

I think that's what UTGSurgeon meant.

Many people in this thread clearly don't understand that poker is gambling. You can gamble with a positive edge, or a negative edge, but it's gambling all the same.

That does make more sense. But still, that player is getting the break even result with skill, and variance does not make a skill game into a luck game.

Don’t get me wrong, Poker IS gambling, and the only guaranteed winner is the House.

This is exactly what I mean just stated better . I think the only other thing I would say is that I would disagree that variance isn’t chance. Because variance is unpredictable I would say that’s exactly what it is.

See I feel like "game of skill" implies winning expectations for skilled players. Otherwise you could argue that something like craps is a game of skill since a player can identify that a pass line bet is better than a hardways, or that video poker is a game of skill if a player recognizes holding 2 jacks is better than just redrawing your hand.

But it doesn't really matter what you think the phrase means now though, my point is merely that we can and should define a game of skill legally in a way where its necessary that its beatable under normal conditions. I don't see any reason why a state or whatever jurisdiction can't do that.

There's no way the a state can definite when a poker game is "beatable under normal conditions" when "beatable" is different for every player and combination of opponents. The same game that might have been beatable to me a year ago might not be beatable to me today. And that game in its "normal condition" today might not be beatable to 99% of pros, but would be beatable to Phil Ivey (or whoever is best at the game). If you can exactly definite when a game is "beatable", then you are in the category of games like blackjack or videopoker, which you claim are -not- games of skill.

I think blackjack and videopoker are also, like poker, simultaneously games of skill and games of chance. But this is not a binary distinction. Poker is -more- of a game of skill than BJ or VP. What make it a game of skill is not whether your win rate is positive or negative, but the amount by which skill can affect your winrate.

Would you say 9/6 JOB VP (99.5% payback) is a game of chance but a hypothetical 10/6 JOB (100.5% payback) is a game of skill?

Its not an exact science as I implied in my first post, and you keep putting "beatable" in scare quotes as if its not already well-used poker lingo. Every experienced poker players asks themselves at some point if a game is beatable when deciding to play, but a state can't ask if an average game is beatable for a slightly above average player?

It shouldn't be that much different than arriving at a number to determine at what point slots are "taking advantage of" a player.

Again, I just disagree with your definition of "game of skill", am not sure where you're getting it from, and it doesn't matter anyway if we can start from scratch and purposefully decide how to define it for legal reasons.

I'm OK with someone calling a countable form of Blackjack (3/2 shoe) a skill game where 6/5 auto-shuffler is just straight gambling. I wouldn't call a broken slot machine that accidentally pays players too much to be a skill game though. Strategic options are also necessary.

A "game of skill" is a game where the outcome is determined at least partially by the skill of the player and not purely by chance.

I still don't see how whether than outcome is actually +EV plays any role. A game where a bad player loses $100 and a good player loses $50 is still a game of skill. Moreoever, lots of games can be categorized as games of skill or games of chance regardless of the money or "EV" involved. Candyland is a game of chance. Go is a game of skill. Settlers of Catan is both a game of skill and game of chance. It makes no difference that these games are rarely played for money.

I suppose you're free to make up your own arbitrary definition and dig in your heels. BUt it seems that very few other people in this thread agree with this definition, and it isn't the most common sense definition in any case.

See I wouldn't use "game of skill" to label a game merely because it has skill. If someone asked me if craps and video poker are games of skill, my answer is simply "no".

I'm proposing a legal definition. Most people don't have a strong opinion on what a "skill game" is because it doesn't matter when you're not attaching policy to it.

Right now, generally our legal systems simply describes games as gambling or not. Skill isn't really mentioned. Seems much more ideal to have two or more groupings:

Gambling: slots, roulette, craps, video poker
Skill games: chess, go, poker, gin, backgammon, bridge

OR

pure gambling: slots, roulette, craps, video poker
hybrid games: poker, gin, backgammon, bridge
pure skill games: chess, go

But I prefer the first grouping. I feel like people both mentally and legally grouping things that way is better for poker. But you can't really justify those groupings if sometimes regular poker isn't effectively any different than video poker due to high rake.

Ok, what about heads-up limit holdem?

This game is played by bots (you can play against Cepheus online) with pseudo GTO precision which can not be defeated, by any human in the world. Would it still be a game of skill to play Cepheus for any amount of money?

The highest possible expectation is to gain zero, and lose the rake if there is rake.

Thoughts?

http://poker.srv.ualberta.ca

I'm confused as to why under your definition you wouldn't label video poker as a game of skill.

There are lots of VP machines that exist in Vegas casinos today that payout more than 100% if played perfectly, but where the perfect strategy is sufficiently complicated that a recreational player playing a simple or intuitive strategy will get a payout of less than 100%.

This seems very analogous to poker to me. An average player will be -EV, but a sufficiently above average player will be +EV. Additionally, the above average player being +EV will depend on the "rake"; if the casino slightly alters the payout for one type of hand, the game will be -EV to everyone.

Mario Kart is a game of skill, but when I challenge my friends to a game for money it becomes gambling.

Obviously there's a ton of skill in the game but I would be opposed to casinos offering it as "a game of skill". Again, I feel like the context of the phrase "game of skill" implies that you can actually use your skill to beat the game (beat as in play with positive expectation). Casinos offering you to play bots that you can't beat are merely offering you an entertainment service.

Pretty sure that isn't the case, though I don't doubt its happened at some point in the history of Vegas.

Just look it up on vpfree2.com. The strip casinos almost never have machines with 100% payouts, but there are several downtown (e.g. I've played many times on the 100.17% DB machines at 4 Queens), and tons of them off-strip.

I admit to having a strong instinct to favor what is more accurate over what is better for poker. Of course, what is better for me as a poker player is to have my opponents mentally classify poker as something that it is not, whether they think chance or skill play more of a role than it actually does.

Looks like pokerstars are getting greedy with the tournament rake now. I read a thread on here not long ago about them changing the lobby format from e.g. buy-in $10+1 to just buy-in $11 and a few people speculated that was so they could increase the rake in future without anyone noticing.

Well it looks like they were right because I played a couple of $11 tourneys tonight and clicked on the structure section in the lobby and they are now $9.80 + $1.20 instead of $10+1. Higher buyins don't seem to be affected though, its just the small buy in players they want to hit (for now at least).

Got to be bad for the growth of the game though. Why not skim a bit more off the high buyin players instead who can afford it instead of making it more difficult for people to work their way up.

^ It probably makes little to no difference. Regs will put in more volume to make the same profit they were making before the rake increase. Recs generally don't notice/care anyway.