Interesting take on Poker Pros (Part II)

[CraigJ]

The thread was getting cluttered so I decided to post new.

My position was Poker being a game of skill and luck, a dominant player like Phil Ivy could have the best of both worlds, he is skilled and lucky. I am not saying you need luck to be a good player. I agree skill out weighs luck in poker.

To try and simplify matters it was brought up that if you flip a coin one billion times the results for EVERYONE will be so close to 50/50 as to take luck out of the picture.

That is a billion times. So really you can't use that analogy/argument when dealing with the amount of poker hands played. Because it is going to be A LOT smaller than a billion hands and therefore we are going to be able to witness larger deviations.

Here is another way to look at whay I am saying. Let's say we have found two poker players who always make the correct decision. Now by correct decision, I don't mean based on the final outcome of a hand. For example, you have pocket Aces and are called all in pre-flop by 7 2 offsuit, you call and are out drawn, the flop is 7 2 2, you still made the correct decision.

We have our two fictional perfect players who always make the correct decision. What is going to determine which one at the end of their poker careers has the best results? (And for sake of argument we are going to assume they played the same number of hands at the same level.) The luck factor in poker will determine it.

Or let's look at it this way. Let's say Phil Ivy is dominating the poker world through skill alone, luck has very little to do with it. If we can find someone just as skilled as Phil Ivy but who is getting luckier who is going to come out on top?

All I have been trying to say is that if you have someone who is VERY skilled and VERY lucky. They are going to dominate the poker world.