Poker: luck or skill?

In my experience, there are periods in poker when you are dealt good cards, and there are periods when you get really bad cards. It's how you bet, bluff and otherwise play when you get the good cards, and how you survive when you get the bad cards, that determines your success. Plus, every player needs to develop a strategy that capitalizes on their strengths. For example, some people are great bluffers, some people know how to set traps, and some people are brilliant at calculating the percentages of possible hands.

As he said, in the long run, poker is most definitely a game of skill, although it allows for luck in the short run. If it wasn't a game of skill, then there wouldn't be serious academic efforts to create skilled AI Hold 'Em players. If it wasn't a game of skill, this research group wouldn't exist:

http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~games/poker/

There's a lot more luck in poker than tennis. Plus no physical training. It definitely requires skill. A lot less than tennis.

Anthony Curtis is well known around Vegas as so full of sh.. he should dress in toilet paper. He is expert on nothing.

There is some skill (mostly bluffing) involved in the five card poker games, less in the seven card poker games and very little in Texas Hold Em, the big tournament game. Look at how many hold em hands come down to the last card where all the players who are still in can win. In addition, if you back up the hand to include the players who folded you often find a winner who folded early. Hold em is almost all luck as evidenced by the many "pros" who don't get out of the early rounds.

This is from a guy who was on the other side of the tables for many years.

Skilled players win in the long run, but the long run is longer than most people think, especially because of the house 'rake'. The house takes 5% or so of every pot above a minimum size and the effect is like brokerage commissions on stock market day traders. I win consistently online, but the total house rake is about 25% of my pre-rake winnings.

In short, without rake you obviously have to be better than a 50th percentile player to win, and if you're a 51st percentile player the long run may be most of a human lifetime. With a 5% rake I estimate you actually have to be a 75th percentile or better player to win long term. But at least you CAN beat the rake, as opposed to an absolute house edge in the other games.

Also, I think a pro's advantage vs. an average, reasonably competent player is only comparable to the typical house edge at, say, blackjack or craps, so over a session/tourney situation of several hundred hands it's quite possible for a pro to get busted out by Joe Average with only a relatively small assist from Lady Luck.

OK let me express the skill vs. luck issue another way. Let's set up a league and a season in Madden Football where all the teams are identical , except that we'll fiddle with one team's kickers' accuracy and distance parameters so that its punter averages 10 more yards/kick than all the others, the FG kicker averages 10% more FGs at any given distance than the others and will never shank a PAT vs. 5% shanked PATs for the rest of the kickers. So now that one team has a skill edge. That team is obviously the one to bet on to ultimately win the Super Bowl if we have the computer play out a season. But how often will it actually make it all the way? Not very often. But if you have the computer play a million seasons you will come out ahead by betting on that team. Pro's have a few more edges than that over average players, but that's about the gist of it.

The Poker world has several players that have won 8 or more world titles. Can you imagine an 8 time champion roulette player, or an 8 time slot machine champion. The only explanation is the skill factor. Sure last year's winner can get knocked out in the first round, but that is the luck component. Sometimes you just don't get the cards and your opponent does.

Poker is first and foremost a game of patience. A player who lacks patience will find that he (or she) has neither luck nor skill.

I think it is 90% luck and 10% skill. Even if you get a pair of good cards, it does not mean anything except you can really put a good bet on them. Everything else depends on the forthcoming cards.

Poker is a percentage game. The best players usually get there money in with a higher percentage to win, but unless the last card is drawn that's usually all it is. An 80% chance to win a particular hand is just that, not a 100% chance to win. So that is why over time the skill matters, because the large numbers mean the percentages play out over many many hands. But yes in the short term the 20% chance to win players can overcome skill if the right card hits.

It's why the only way to tell the great players are the one's who can win over a long period of time, say 10 years. Certainly not a single tournament.

It's not that complicated a question. If you play one hand, luck weighs extremely heavily. Conversely, if you play an infinite number of hands, luck is completely removed from the equation.

As the number of hands dealt approaches infinity, the variation between cards dealt to different players approaches zero. As variation in cards approaches zero, the only thing left to determine who wins is skill.

It's in the realm between one hand and infinite hands where people argue about luck vs. skill. And obviously, since infinity isn't attainable, there is always luck.

What people are failing to mention as a third variable is the fuzzy human perceptual instinct. Does luck say you have a good hand and skill say you should raise, yet that little voice inside tells you to fold? Anybody can learn to weather a storm of bad cards, and anyone can learn to raise or fold based upon situational probabilities. But the great players are separated by their ability to "just know" at just the right time when appearances are to be ignored.

There is far more skill than luck required, no question. You can be consistently lucky and get great cards but without the skill to maximize your potential winnings with those cards they won't do you much good. Of course there is no way that poker should be compared to any physical sport like tennis or golf, because while both poker and sports require skills, they are compeltely different skill sets and therefore you're comparing apples and oranges. There is of course a physical component to poker in that it can be difficult to stay compeltely alert for the extended times one must sit relatively motionless at a poker table for hours on end.

So in short, in poker you need skill to capitalize on your good luck and skill to overcome your bad luck.

It is a game of skill and luck. The skill is not primarily in the understanding of odds or position, but in being able to read people and being able to act for others.

Ina nutshell, the skill factor in poker involves a) the player's ability to calculate the odds for a given hand, b) the player's ability to "read" opponents for strength/weakness and c) the player's ability to avoid giving the other players any information during the hand. There is also the physical factor that comes into play when a tournament runs over hours or days on an event like the WSOP mainevent. All of these interact with luck such that poker is an extremely complex meld that allows skilled professionals to make a viable career, while still providing that once in a lifetime opportunity for all those lucky amateurs to experience their 15 minutes of fame (and fortune).

If a talented player can win 51% of the time compared to an opponent's 49%, the odds that the opponent will go broke over the long run is essentially 100% - provided that each bets are only a small fraction of the total amount originally held by both players.

Think of the roulette wheel. If you have $100, and you bet it out in $1 bets until you either hit $200 or lose everything... well, odds are close to 100% that you'll lose everything.

But if you put it all on black, odds are 48% to 52% (or so, depending on the table). If you simply saw a small sample output (say, 10 or 20 outcomes) without knowing these odds in advance, you would have a tough time knowing whether the player or house holds the advantage.

I think this is why it's difficult to percieve the talented player's advantage if you only watch a few rounds. But over the long haul, the advantage of the skilled player is close to 100%.

As a table game played at the same stakes over time (not a tournament game), poker is largely luck in the short term and almost entirely skill in the long term. From a mathematical perspective, this is because the random process of a player's bankroll over time can be (incompletely) characterized by its mean and its variance. The mean is the average rate that money is won or lost over time; for other table games, the mean is more or less fixed and is the house edge. The variance is the degree of fluctuation from the mean. As with most gambling games, the variance in poker is quite large. However, the contribution of variance to the mean is negligible over a significantly long period of time, and the average contribution of variance to the mean is nil.

In my experience many players who claim poker is mostly luck are the ones that lose at it most of the time. Even without a good knowledge of math, you can use simple logic to solve whether poker is mostly luck or not. If poker was mostly luck, how is it that so many players win enough games to make a living on it. They must be the luckiest people in the world!

However, the element of luck in poker is greater then say, tennis or chess. It is big enough to where big name pros will lose in early rounds once in a while. However, I guarentee you, if you take 25 top pros and 75 average poker players, and pit them against each other for 100 tournements, to where the top 25% get paid, I guarentee you that by the end of that 100 tournemnets the pros will have made money and most of the other players will have lost money. This would be impossible if the game were mostly luck.

Anyone who has seen that recent video of Tilly with the full house of Jacks and checking the river because she thought a pro had quad kings (runner runner kings i might add) should be asking themselves some serious questions about the legitimancy of these big tournaments.
That was seriously the most bizarre thing I have ever seen a a poker table
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tN6wAHTWeEA
For her to have won a bracelet playing like that screams that these tournaments are manipulated to some degree to get these names through. If it were a bunch of pros no one had ever heard of around a table even for a large amount of money would as many people care? But get Ben Affleck or Toby Maguire up there and suddenly the media takes a major interest.