"Poker is a game of chance"

[WhiteWolf]

[ QUOTE ]
"Poker is 90% luck"

what's your reply to that?

[/ QUOTE ]

Luck evens out. Skill accumulates.

[wmspringer]

Poker is 100% luck.
Except when I win.
Then it's all skill, baby :-)

[wtfsvi]

[ QUOTE ]
... poker is 99% skill...

[/ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Poker is 90% luck

[/ QUOTE ]

I don't know which of these statements are farther from the truth.

[Eratosthenes]

In one hand of poker, it far more than 90% luck--22 beats AA about 20% of the time. In 500,000 hands it is far less than 90%. Almost anyone should be able to see that skill leads to a long term edge. The good player sees favorable situations and bets/raises/calls, and he folds the unfavorable situtations. The poor player puts money in the pot too often in unfavorable situations and fails to take full advantage of favorable situations.

In the coin flipping analogy, the good player wins 51% of the flips. Whether he wins the next flip is just dumb luck. In fact it is luck that determins if he makes a profit on the next 10 or 100 flips. When the number of flips gets to 10,000 or 100,000 the player with the small (per hand) advantage is almost certain to win.

[daPlayboy]

My wife says the same thing. Annoys me to death. I tell her she's lucky she gets a shopping allowance each month.

[qwnu]

[ QUOTE ]
Why do you want to convince them otherwise. Just smile and take their money. Let them believe its luck.

[/ QUOTE ]

The problem is that legislators who believe this use it to justify their attempts to ban it. See other thread.

I think it's in our best interests to educate people (players and non-players alike) on this point. Most intelligent people can easily understand that there are elements of both skill and luck involved. Consider the heads-up tournament that was televised on NBC - does anybody really believe that they might as well have just drawn straws?

[Number27]

Ask Senator Goodlatte to risk an arbitrary amount of money playing Phil Ivey heads up. It's all luck right? [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

[John Shiznit]

baseball at the mlb level is highly luck dependant.
In a sense nobody says barry bonds sux because he makes an out 65 percent of the time.
Pujols has 0 for 15 slumps.

I think baseball is a great comparison in some sense.

[tom10167]

YOU CANT WIN IF YOU DONT GET THE CARDS

[Mitch Evans]

I assume you're trying to convince someone who doesn't play that there's more skill involved than luck. Well, good luck with that; it's not going to happen. The more you try to convince people that there's a skill element and not just pure gambling, the more you will sound like a degenerate addicted [censored]. Don't even try.

If you must, however, your best bet is not to get into detail (again this will make you sound hopeless to them), but instead just use the casino analogy. Ask them why casinos make [censored] loads of money every year. After all, the casino is wagering money as well. After they explain why casinos make money, tell them poker is a game of changing odds and the skill is to wager when the odds are in your favor (like a casino game), and not to wager when the odds are in your opponents favor. Since the odds constantly change, everyone has the same opportunities over time and those who wager favorably, win (don't get into things like outplaying opponents or other technical elements). After that doesn't work tell them, "It's okay to be addicted to gambling as long as you're not addicted to losing."