Quote:
Originally Posted by minimoke
"Ladies and Gentlemen,
A simple question. How important in your opinion is 'luck' in poker? Skill versus luck for example 90%-10%, 75%-25%, 50%-50%? How much luck is required to win? Or do you believe skill alone is enough to win and if so, why does the best player not win every tournament? I'd be very interested in your feedback. Thank you."
The answer to this depends partly on the context, for example, short-term or long term. For a cash game player playing more than 10,000 hands per month, it might be possible to never have a losing month.
Dusty "Leatherass" Schmidt claims exactly that in his book, 10K hands a month and zero losing months, with a documented win rate of $800 per hour. Tournaments, as already mentioned, are very different, because one hand could decide whether you make it to a final table with a chance to play for life-changing money.
The "what percentage is luck" question comes up often in the skill-game argument. Many state laws decide how a game should be treated on one criterion--it is a game of skill or a game of chance. This is called the predominance argument, where sometimes a judge will decide whether poker is "mostly skill" or mostly luck. Clearly, under this test, chess is a game of skill and roulette is a game of chance.
Many judges have ruled that under the predominance test, poker is in fact a game of skill.
(I will find a link to a judge's opinion and insert it here.)
For this purpose, many on these forums estimate that poker is about 80% skill and 20% luck (or, in math terms, 20% statistical variance.) Your skill can control or manage a lot of situations, but it can't control a bad run of cards or Phil Ivey being seated at your immediate left during a tournament.
Keep in mind that variance can also be positive. I watched a televised tournament where someone played 64o on two consecutive hands, and he won both hands, making first a straight, then two pair.
Last edited by Poker Clif; 03-27-2014 at 11:42 AM.