Re: help on proving poker is not about luck
ycjason, while a graph is a nice idea, it fails to actually demonstrate to your friend exactly how the luck factor can be overcome by skilled play.
If your friend is sophisticated enough to look at a PT graph and actually grasp it's meaning, he's sophisticated enough to understand a verbal explanation of how luck can be overcome in poker.
Explain to him that every action yields a certain Expected Value, or EV. A skilled player will constantly make decisions with Positive EV, or +EV. With each additional +EV decision a player makes, his potential earnings increase. After a large enough sample of +EV decisions have been executed, the probability of having lost money becomes infinitesmally small.
If your friend cannot grasp this verbal explanation, no graph is going to help him.
Also ycjason, I would say that the majority of random people you meet on the street are incapable of grasping this kind of logic, so don't get your hopes up too high of 'converting' your friend into an EV believer.
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