[Article] Is Playing Poker ReallyGambling?

[Daddys_Visa]

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The statement that all players will eventually go broke depends on two assumptions:

1.) That each player plays for an infinite amount of time.
2.) There is an infinite stream of money coming into the poker world.

If these are satisfied, every player will eventually bust out at some point. The stakes they wager each hand and their present bankroll are irrelevant.

Say you had $1,000,000 and only played 1/2 limit holdem, you would eventually hit a losing streak so bad that you would lose it all. Since you are playing for an infinite amount of time this is inevitable.

Now obviously our poker playing lifetimes do not satisfy condition #1 and never will, so this is really just an academic discussion.

-Daddys_Visa-

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No. Once you reach $500,000, you move down to .50/1.00. And once you reach $250,000 you move down to .25/.50. Thus, you will never, ever, ever go broke. You might, in billions and billions of years, find yourself playing a very unsatisfying .000001/.000002 game though.

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There's some pretty bad math in this discussion. If you have $1,000,000 and play 1/2 LH with a winrate/standard deviation ratio of .1, you will never ever go broke, even with infinite trials. Yes, at any given time your chances of going broke will be finite while you have infinite trials left, but since the chances reduce over trials as you win, they can be summed (basic high-school math), and if you sum all your chances of going broke together they will still add up to a negligibly small number.

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I still stand by what I said. You even admit that you always have a finite chance of going broke. If you play for an infinite amount of time you WILL bust out eventually because like I said, you will eventually hit a losing streak so bad it will bust you even if it takes you losing 500,000 straight hands. The mistake you are making is thinking about infinity as "just a really big number", rather than an eternity playing poker hands. I dont care how much you are up or what your edge in the game is, if it takes 10^500 years for that losing streak to happen, infinity will still ensure it. Of course at this point the discussion becomes purely a mind exercise as the numbers involved are beyond the grasp of mere laymen like myself.