How much luck is involved in poker?
Join Date: Aug 2019
Posts: 364
What Percentage of Poker Is Luck?
Join Date: Aug 2012
Posts: 16,390
It starts at 100% and drops to zero.
Join Date: Dec 2021
Posts: 102
depends on how you look at the game.
- if you look at poker as a strategy-game, its 0% luck and 100% a war of who makes the better decision between opponents.
- if you look at poker purely as a way to grow your capital, the luck factor heavily depends on the played samplesize. if you play only 1 hand lifetime, the luck factor of growing your capital or not is 99.9%. if you play 10million hands the luck factor is 0.0001% if you grow your capital or not (or lose as a bad player obv)
Join Date: Aug 2011
Posts: 22,508
the best way i can sum it up when explaining to people why they couldn't just give me $20 and let me run it up into $100 was that even when everything aligns perfectly (villain shoves blind you call with with AA) you're at best an 85/15 favorite, if you do a more realistic exercise of you you calling top 15% of hands you are only a 65% favorite
even a situation where you have him dominated ie AKs vs AQo where the Q is same suit as your hand, you're still just 73% likely to win
this is of course in a toy game where no actions occur post flop
but you get the idea, you can do everything right and still lose a big chunk of the time, likewise, you can make a horrible punt and then get rewarded for doing so
biggest pot of my life I flopped a set and guy shoved with 4 high, he was just trying to bluff, didn't even realize his hand was still live, needed runner runner to hit a wheel and that's exactly what he did, which happens 3.2% of the time, but this didn't happen 100 times where i win 97 of them, it happened once, and i lost
Join Date: May 2016
Posts: 3,299
To be honest I'll never understand this question, if you want a luck %, what are the other categories?
Join Date: Mar 2012
Posts: 959
A decreasing amount as you play more and more hands.
Join Date: Jan 2022
Posts: 13
If you always get it in pre-flop, there are times where you lose with AA, and there are times when you crack AA. You can call that luck, but in actuality it's just variance / mathematics.
The more hands you play, the less "luck" plays a role. The most skilled players will always win the long run.
However. Luck is a skill. Some people do seem to be luckier than others; getting it in bad and winning more often. Statistically, this should also reduce to near 0 after a large hand sample size. No single person can be "lucky" forever, the math just doesn't support it.
But hey, I would rather be lucky that good!
Join Date: Oct 2018
Posts: 8,077
Over 40 or 50 years about 9% +/- 3% ... except for outliers.
