[spino1i]

[ QUOTE ]
This his been an interesting thread to read through, but the fact is the "sklansky poker skill argument" doesn't do anything except attempt to redefine what "skill" means, and poorly at that. Do you really want whether or not someone can lose quickly to be the factor by which we judge skill in games? whether or not a game of luck has elements that allow a player with no concept of the general strategy has nothing to do with how much skill the game has.

I would like to address the "50% skill" arguments, though. You see, the way poker usually gets shafted is by too small of a statistical sampling determening whehter or not it is a game of skill. In a single hand, poker is far less than 50% skill, in most formats. (this changes depending on what game you play, but i'm talking in general) I have an 18 VPIP in limit holdem, and whether or not I fold a hand is determined somewhere around 95% of the time by the cards I'm dealt. so, in a given hand, luck is more than an 80% determiner if I even have a chance to play...

but over the course of a session, or many sessions, the thing that will impact my results more than anything else is not the hands I was dealt, but the selectivity that I used in playing in the first place. the bigger the sampling involved, the more skill that would be involved. If you are trying to defend that poker is more than 50% skill, you have to make sure the sampling is defined to properly present poker.

A great analogy to do this is baseball, and on almost every level of baseball. A pitch, an At Bat, An Inning, or a game is determined more by luck than by skill. even when a pitch throws a pitch that is easy to put in play, If the hitter can't knock it out of the park, luck determines more than anything else whether or not he gets a hit. In any given at-bat, Ichiro, the most skilled hitter in baseball, is only 15-20% more likely to get a hit than the bottom 10% of hitters in the MLB. (my math and statistics might be a little off here, but you get my point) and the best team in baseball is probably only 20 or 30 percent more likely to win a single game than the worst team in the MLB. There was a rule change for postseason play, because many people argued that the Mets lost a postseason series because they got "unlucky" and had thier first game of the previous series rained out, negatively affecting thier rotation.

So the trick to the 50% argument is getting a proper sampling size. Every Jury is full of people who think that Baseball is a game of skill rather than luck. Use the Baseball analogy to ensure that the parameters for determining skill are not set unfairly against poker.

In a wider view, I feel that allowing the argument to be whether or not poker is about skill plays into the hands of those who are attacking us. That's like the people who argue Marijuana should be legal because it's got good effects, ceding that it's ok to make a drug illegal if it's bad enough for you.

The issue isn't whether or not Poker is enough of a game of skill that it's okay for our government to let us play, but whether or not our government recognizes that it's not within thier scope of legitimate power to determine whether or not the luck involved in an action has any bearing on our legal rights to participate.

We shouldn't be seperating ourselves from those who are also being attacked by our government because they are sports bettors or craps players, All of our rights are equally being attacked. Poker players aren't unfairly being included in this legislation, this legislation is wrong from it's inception, and I wouldn't want to give up the moral highground here so that we can just not be the ones who are assaulted THIS TIME.

[/ QUOTE ]

very good post.