Quote:
Originally Posted by David Sklansky
I am posting this here rather than on the legislation forum because there are more visitors here. If what I am about to write helps the cause, anyone should feel free to use it.
People who argue that poker is predominately skill have to deal with the fact that good players sometimes have losing weeks. This happens because the hourly standard deviation for an expert player is usually at least ten times the expected hourly rate. Eventually this doesn't matter because the win rate is proportional to the number of hours played while the standard deviation is proportional to the square root of the number of hours. Thus in my example, after 100 hours the win rate exceeds the standard deviation. At which point the player is almost 90% to be ahead.
Is this good enough for our purposes? Perhaps not. And I will shortly improve upon it. But it does give a clue as to the structure of an argumently as to whether something is predominately skill. There has to be an x% chance that the better player will be ahead after y hours.
If people accept the definition of predominately skill as having a 90% chance of being ahead after 100 hours, poker instantly fits. But that might not seem strong enough to the layman. If so one needs to go a bit further.
Firstly one must point out to him that expert poker players are usually playing against very good players. So the skill difference is small. But that fact means it is not fair to judge them on the 100 hour threshold. Even if a game is almost all skill and very little luck, if the players were equally skilled, the contest APPEARS to be all luck. And if there was a tiny skill differential, the contest would APPEAR to be almost all luck. The slightly better player could be behind after many hours.
So my first contention is that the only fair way to judge the degree of skill is in comparison to an AVERAGE player. I'll get back to that.
If an average player plays a session of whatever game against an expert player, what kind of favorite would the expert need to be for that session, before you would say that his skill predominates over luck? It seems that 3-1 is about right. If the game was all skill the expert would be 100%. If the game was all luck it would be 50%. Thus anything above 75% would suggest commonsensically that skill predominates over luck.
So we have lowered the bar from 90% to 75%. Most experts are 75% to be ahead after perhaps 50 hours.
But that is when they are against good to very good players. A misleading standard. Suppose they were against average players. The ones who break even on the kitchen table. In that case the experts skill would be such that it was 75% he would be ahead after ten hours at most. And I have a feeling that such a statistic would convince most non players that poker was predominately skill.
But even the above is not a totally fair measure. Unless the game was head up. The fairer criteria would be how the expert COMPARED to the average player after a certain number of hours. Would he be doing better or worse? I think we would all agree that in most poker ring games an average player would have less than a 25% chance even after three or four hours, to be doing better than an expert sitting in that same seat.
Hopefully that last sentence, properly proved, gets the job done.
I posted this earlier, but this seems like it's a fairly air-tight argument for the predominance of skill in poker:
In my opinion people are thinking about this the wrong way in terms of skill and luck and that is because the difference in skill between any two people who know the rules is not that great (yes even between Ivey and some noob). The better way to think about this is if two people are playing and one is trying to win and the other is trying to lose and they both follow the rules of the game will the person trying to win usually/always win. The answer for poker is obviously yes. If I raise/fold 100% of the time and my opponent is not a moron and knows that I am doing this, he invariably wins. This is true for all games of skill, (basketball, tennis, etc...) but is not true of games that involve skill (i.e., sports-betting, stock market investing, etc...). While following the rules of these "games" even if you try to throw a match you could not be guaranteed to do so. I think this demonstrates the predominance of skill in poker over luck, however, the problem is more complicated as skill edge is so small and thus the likelihood that an individual wins any given match or over any given period of time devolves into a statistical argument but that seems to be completely irrelevant for whether poker is a predominantly skill game and thus differs from sports betting. I hope someone lets the PPA know about this argument because even though it seems trivially obvious to me, I haven't heard it yet (admittedly though I haven't read much on the subject).