Luck vs. Skill test...

[pete fabrizio]

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The stack sizes would be 500,000 big bets, which would likely take over a million hands, which is clearly the long run. Against a great limit holdem player (I'm not sure Ivey is a great one), I think our newbie would have maybe a .1% chance of winning.
There is no way, the number is exactly 0% because it is possible (although infinitely small) that our newbie has the best hand almost every hand.
Also after 50-100K hands, our newbie may have grasped enough of the game to be at the level of someone like ourselves and would therefore be less of a dog.

If this headsup match was played many times, and the top pro won over 99% of them, then you could prove to a mathematically educated person that this game is a skill game, however there would still be people that don't understand and just think the pro is really lucky.

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.1% is way way way way overestimating the novices chances of going on a **500,000** BB heater against a superior opponent. That would be about right if the person got supernaturally lucky and won the first $999,000. Assume Ivey has a 1BB/hr winrate and a standard deviation of 10BB/hr. His risk of ruin would be ((1-($2/$20))/(1+(2/20)))^(1000000/20), or about 3.09*10^-4358 (a decimal point followed by 4000+ zeroes and then a 3). Or for comparison, it's about the same likelihood of picking a random hydrogen atom out of the universe. And then randomly picking it again. And again. And again. Fifty times. So yeah, I'd pretty much say it is zero.