BTW, that's not even the point. The existence of players who make a living from poker should be enough proof. Casinos have proven for years that there is a rational strategy to profit from games of chance, and this strategy is called having a measurable edge. Nobody will argue against that. There is enough holdem manager, poker tracker **** to explain how edges work in poker.

The debate should be centered on making playing poker a legally valid economic activity just like running a casino or trading on the stock market.

Luck is not the odds, luck is our imaginary belief that we can beat the odds (over the long run) - sometimes luck is just not getting unlucky - which is basically the casino business model and the goal of every poker player; get your money in good every time and 'in the long run' you come out ahead.

While casino's are referred to as gambling businesses, nobody actually thinks they are doing any gambling as everyone accepts that they are in it for the long run.

The same holds true for professional poker players, law-makers aren't against poker because they think the pros are taking too much risk, they oppose it on the grounds that a recreational player can unknowingly be the only one at the table actually gambling.

This is why I maintain that we need to stop this campaign of trying to prove there is no luck in poker, quit posting nanonoko's graph and replace it with Chris Moneymaker's face.

Luck isn't the enemy of a recreational poker player, it is his ally in defeating the evil sharks congress is so concerned about, and while patience and discipline will help to shield the pro's from lady luck, as long as the pro's are human and not bots they have no inherent monopoly on using those skills.

We need to be careful because the argument that might get the charges against FT & Stars dropped could actually turn out to be the argument that gets poker legislation thrown out of congress.

Thanks for the proof. I will ask Senate to consult you regarding the IPoker bill.

all this shows that either you accept the premise that initation of force is wrong or you have to define some really shady grey areas that really doesnt make sense.

the problem i see here is that with your craps example is, losing in the long run is expected in craps...the skill argument with poker is that a "pro" expects to win in the long run not just slowly lose less....

Sorry to ignore the rest of your post, but I wanna just talk about the idea of luck being a belief.

Saying luck is imaginary is kind of like pissing on the dictionary. I agree that it's not simply a black & white case that luck = odds, because luck exists on so many different levels.

Luck exists every time there is a chance element. Not getting unlucky (e.g like you bring up, say, not running kk into aa) is a part of chance. And chance is something we can sometimes easily quantify into odds, but can also be layered.

e.g the chances of running kk into aa heads up is like 0.49%. So I guess it's kind of counter intuitive to point out that if both players must get it in preflop (eg <10bb husng), if the KK wins, he was still the unlucky one in the hand relative to those two events of 'kk into aa'; and 'kk beats aa' (18%).

Now obviously one could point that it was indeed lucky to get KK in the first place, and that this player is going to go broke with any two most the time if our opponent wakes up with AA.

So then it boils down to just being 50/50 on who wins the hand if it's correct to always shove giving us an illusion of being lucky or unlucky. Don't confuse this with an imaginary notion though. Because people use the word luck when they're explaining an event in hindsight. There's nothing inherently fallacious about this. If there is a random chance element that affects the outcome, then luck is present. So it follows that: 'Player A won due to chance alone, therefore he got lucky' is a tautology.

The people claiming that poker is purely a skill game are simply wrong. For the majority of players, poker is predominantly a game of luck. This is because the majority of players play only a relatively small number of hands in their lifetime.

The people posting here are in the very small minority who realise that if they play enough hands they can virtually eliminate the element of luck. But when politicians consider the issue, they won't be thinking of the players who mass multi-table in order to play a few hundred thousand hands a year to minimise luck. They will consider the majority of the player pool, the "average American" if you like, who is only going to play a few hundred or thousand hands in a year. They will think of the players who take a trip to Vegas once a year, or have a home game every fortnight, or who would like to logon to Stars and single table for an evening a week, or perhaps play quite a lot for a couple months and get bored. For these players, the game is mainly a game of luck. In this sense, the politicians are not actually wrong by considering poker as a game of luck - it depends on the type of player they actually care about when thinking about the issue. And generally speaking, that is not going to be the typical 2+2 posting, multi-tabling pro/semi-pro. This is why you lot are up against it in my opinion

The casino wins in the long run, the professional poker player (could) win in the long run, what's the difference exactly? Once again there's an unfounded bias for players to be okay with games that benefit them but not okay with games that benefit the casino, as if the casino is some black hole where money disintegrates, never to be seen again.

Also, the player base will, as a whole, ALWAYS end up negative in poker.

So rake-free poker is a game of skill? That's good that it's a game of skill in your world, but it's unfortunate that no entity will ever be able to charge a fee for facilitating a safe and convenient venue in which to play it. But, at least it would be nice to be able to play golf without paying greens fees in your world. (devil's advocate)

What's with all the straw man responses? That was exactly my point, it doesn't matter if the highest achievable ROI is positive (as it can be in poker), or negative (as it is in craps). Who profits over the longterm doesn't matter.

I agree with all the posters in this thread saying that the luck/skill debate is unnecessary for our issue at this point in time, yet I'd like to ask something about this OP.
David, how do you possibly decide on what the "average" poker player is exactly? And why do you randomly pick someone from the middle of the pool, wouldn't your argument be as valid if you where to compare the worlds best player with the worlds worst player as an extreme example?
As long as the worlds worst player plays within the rules of the game, it would clearly demonstrate a large skill gap, but not quantify it. Also, depending on which player you pick to match against your expert, you could pretty much get to any skill/luck %-combination you want. Your method shows that the smaller the skill gap between two players is, the bigger the luck factor becomes (which is true for every single game that is not a pure game of chance), but you fail to show any concrete correlation. What am I missing?

When you read what the judge said in part 3, I'm surprised smart guys like David haven't recognized this is the crux of the debate. The rest of the back and forth is just defending statements/positions.

You can't beat the game without skill. But the bottom line is two things -

One is skill isn't quantifiable. Even experts would agree that assigning win rates to players is for most an approximation and almost impossible for the masses.

The other is that skill alone doesn't predominantly control the outcome.

The really smart guys should focus their efforts on proving how an unquantifiable variable is the deciding factor in a game.

Approximations of skill expressed in win/hourly rates is hard to prove as a predominance factor.

The distinction between poker and casino games is that Casinos can fully disclose their strategy to a player and the player is guaranteed to lose in the long run. One player (the casino) can exercise no skill (fixed, disclosed strategy) and still be guaranteed to win in the long run (http://wizardofodds.com/houseedge). That's a game dominated by luck.

In poker, player A can gain an advantage over player B by adjusting his/her strategy, and then player B can gain an advantage over player A by adjusting his/her strategy. Thus, both players can exercise skill, and neither player is guaranteed to be a winner in the long run, but the more skilled player will win in the long run. That's a game dominated by skill.

I hope this clears up your confusion.

So because one player making arbitrary decisions means there's a variable optimal response means the game is automatically skill? If so, rock paper scissors satisfies that criterion.

Furthermore, unexploitable strategies exist in many situations in poker so unless legislation is passed with the caveat that you can only play 200 BB 6 max cash games this argument isn't going to fly either. The very existence of the IGT heads up limit bot is proof that poker is just a more complicated version of any other form of gambling.

Really, people need to give this up.

You're missing the commonsensicalnessaments

If you could get the politicians to just read one of the "Fundamental Theory" books this wouldn't be an issue.

I think the angle to take is : It's going to be played anyway, the government can either get a cut of the billions while bringing much needed regulation to the arena or they can leave it to the law of the Jungle and miss out. It was, is, and always will be all about the money.

Also use the term "Big Government" when talking about the government blocking people's rights to personal freedom to any conservative hypocrites that preach smaller government in one sentence then try to legislate morality in the next.

The problem with Ike's post is that it's kind of arguing semantics. At the end of the day you aren't allowed to let americans play games of luck on the internet for money, so in order to ensure their freedom to play games of skill on the internet for money you have to try and differentiate the two.

While it's theoretically absurd to claim you know exactly where the line is, for the sake of Poker you still have to try and come up with the most compelling argument for why it should be considered a skill based game.

Your reductive logic argument is nonsense. You're saying that because some trivial toy game (rock paper scissors) has an optimal strategy, and that game has similar characteristics to other games (hold 'em), then that means that the entire class of games is skill-less? By that logic, you can use tic-tac-toe to argue that Go and Chess are skill-less.

The "people" who need to be "giving this up" are not the poker players who are fighting to try and get clearly legal status for the game.

The "people" you should be telling to "give up" are the politicians who wrote the laws that distinguish between "games of skill" and "games of chance." And you should encourage the judges who interpret those laws and decide which games are legal to play for money and which are not based on their conclusions as to whether the outcome of the game is mostly determined by chance or skill, to also give up. And the people you should most strongly encourage to "give up" are the cops, SWAT teams and FBI who shut down and raid poker games in peoples' dens, try and stop people from playing poker online, but never raid clubs or homes where people play Bridge for money. They also indict Stars and FTP for "illegal gambling" but never even raise an eye at sites like VirginGames and WorldWinner where folks wager on things like Solitaire and DukeNuke'em.

When you have gotten all those people to "give up." Then you will be right to ask those of us fighting for poker to also give up.

Seriously, do you think we poker players are out there arguing that the thing to do is divide all games into skill games and chance games and to do this on the basis of a thing called the predominance test?

That is the test our politicians, courts, and law enforcement demand we meet, not the test we ask them for.

When they give it up, so will I.

Skallagrim

The skill vs luck argument is a Sick Obsession...
All these people think "winning" this argument...
Will lead to the wholesale legalization of poker.

No, sorry... it won't.

Poker is a quasi-legal gambling game...
Because there is NO compelling reason to legalize it...
(Even the tax take would be tiny)...
And MANY compelling reasons not to legalize it.

And after reading about 1,000 posts by DS...
Many of which are semi-comprehensible at best...
I'm convinced that his poker books were ghost-written.

Try to imagine a random, average person reading the OP.

It's a bit insulting to say that because I think this is an awful argument that I must not be fighting for poker. On the contrary, I'm forced to live in Canada right now to earn a living and resent the UIGEA every bit as much as you do, perhaps even moreso. It's my desire to see the fight succeed that makes it imperative to me that we stop making bad arguments. As I mentioned there is a fantastic economic and libertarian case to be made for online poker and strong empirical evidence to prove that the damages its opponents claim it will cause are either false or exaggerated.

Moreover the SDNY is alleging that poker has to pass an even more rigid test than the predominance test, they merely have to prove there's "material chance" in poker and for all the people who are so quick to want to link nanonoko's graph, it would be just as easy for poker's opponents to link I7AXA's graph. Try to explain how a guy with no discipline or skill can earn more in 12 hours than most poker professionals earn in a year without there being material chance in the game. Even worse is that there's legal precedent against poker as a game of skill and while there may be ways to distinguish online poker from the cases the SDNY is invoking, such arguments would be a stretch. This just isn't a path to victory.

just curios; has there been analysis done to what degree poker results can be modeled by a normal distribution? Or whether there is a simple more fitting prob. distribution?

Fundamentals people, we are arguing that poker is a game of skill, while they say it isn't! So its either 100% skill or 0% skill.

How do we do it:

Science experiment, and mentioned science papers should do the work!

experiment: 100 pros keep playing random people HU sngs, 6 an hour per pro, for like 4 hours should get you to 2400, do that for a week should get you to a decent number! Guess who will score more?
Now I got no education, but I know there is math that can show that this result will deviate from a coin flip by this and that much. Saying chances of this being a coin flip are 1:1000, so we can determin that poker is a game of skill with a 99.9% certainty.

Make a science paper on it so people replicate experiment and than you could get more data and 99.99999999 percent certainty. So its 100% OK Sklansky?

/thread

It does matter to Congress, because if the highest achievable ROI is negative in poker, then they don't want us playing it.