How My Son's Insight May Have Saved Poker

[MicroBob]

[ QUOTE ]
How about this?

Poker is a game of skill because you can study the game and improve.

No matter how much you study games in which luck is the determining factor of success, one cannot improve. You can't study bingo or the lottery and win more money more often. There is no need for any books on either.

If you can study it, you can improve. Therefore, it is a skill.

[/ QUOTE ]


You can still improve at a game that will still be -EV for the player.

Take David's Hold-em based carnival game for example (WPT-Holdem I think is the one he developed...there are many similar).

You can have zero clue of the correct strategy and perhaps be at a 5% disadvantage.
And then actually study what cards you should play on wizardofodds and perhaps lower that to a 1% disadvantage.

So it's absolutely a game in which somne skill is involved. And you are still going to lose. Just not as fast.

Same for a game like 3-card Poker or Caribbean Stud.

In 3CP you can play every hand and think that's the best strategy. And you can be at a 5% disadvantage again (just guessing).
Or you can learn that QT2 is the worst hand you should play and you can fold the hands worse than that...and perhaps lower your disadvantage to 2%.


Also - somebody in the thread mentioned that it's possible to play blackjack so badly that you can lose every hand if you want to.
I don't believe this is true.
I don't think you are allowed to hit on a hard-21 anywhere that I'm familiar with.
So, no matter how badly you try to play, you are going to accidentally win a few hands along the way.

[Cactus Jack]

Yes, but nobody can "study" 3CP or Caribbean Stud, etc., and be possibly the best in the world. There is no argument who the best bingo player in the world is. There is an argument over who is the best Bridge or Chess player, as there is with the world's best poker player. A skill is something that can be learned, improved and honed through study, experience and hard work. Luck is none of these.

"Vegas is a town build on bad math." Penn Gillette

[flair1239]

Don't know if this has been said or not, but this rule would also apply to Blackjack and Video Poker. And both of these games are typically -EV when played against the house... I would think the object of any testimony should be to separate poker from other gambling games.

[Luckboxer]

[ QUOTE ]


I would also be interested in how you would respond to the skill v. chance argument if it were phrased in this manner: Does chance account for over 50% of the results (of individual hands) in Poker?



[/ QUOTE ]

Its a problematic question because its like asking whether a rectangles legnth accounts for more than 50% of its area.

[Jimmy The Fish]

[ QUOTE ]
Yes, but nobody can "study" 3CP or Caribbean Stud, etc., and be possibly the best in the world. There is no argument who the best bingo player in the world is. There is an argument over who is the best Bridge or Chess player, as there is with the world's best poker player. A skill is something that can be learned, improved and honed through study, experience and hard work. Luck is none of these.

"Vegas is a town build on bad math." Penn Gillette

[/ QUOTE ]

I like the bridge allusion, as it's another game of incomplete information that is also unquestionably a game of skill.

[roy_miami]

Something I was thinking about this morning, I'm not sure if this has ever been discussed before..

It's ironic that in the States, if someone is being prosecuted in relation to poker, the state is probably trying to prove poker is a game of chance. In Canada and most other countries), if someone is being prosecuted in relation to online poker its probably due to tax evasion, where prosecutors are going to say poker is a game of skill. If anybody in Canada (or any other country with similar tax laws)has ever been convicted of not paying taxes on poker wouldn't that set a legal precedent for it being considered a game of skill?

[AAAA]

we used to play a game called CRATES, which was the predecessor of UNO. the game was a game of honor, and winning was not important..the goal of an expert player was to come in second...much harder than winning.

it was definitely a game of skill!

[Emperor]

Another hypocrisy.
Semi-pro sports. Especially Golf, Tennis, and drag racing.

They all pay an entry fee into a tournament. Purse is distributed among top percentage of finishers. All have a significant element of chance.

Looks like a poker tournament to me.

[AnyMouse]

As far as I can tell, this main part of this argument is mostly mired in how to define results and measure the effect of skill to determine whether we have more than 50% or not.

Idea: Skill-based results are deviations from the "control" based on players' decisions. So set up two tables: one at which every player plays every hand to showdown for X (one bet, one bet on every street--pick a standard) and one at which people actually play poker.

Now we can see how many hands end up differently (have a different winner, result in differing win-amounts, whatever your standard is) from one table to the other. We can do this with tables that have exactly the same hand distributions and tables that have random distributions. We can even do this as a thought-experiment by just calculating what the control results would have been using data from an actual table and comparing to the actual results.

And we have a very simple and very powerful demonstration of exactly the deviation "skill" causes.

[Skallagrim]

I appreciate all the math formulas in the last few posts. I would really like to see someone actually do the exercise, say with a 1,000 or so hands from Pokertracker or similar.

I also see that no one has really come up with a way to refute or show a logical flaw in the argument I put forward earlier. The only reason I continue to stress that argument (aside from having not yet seen the results of these math fomulas in action) is that it relies on LOGIC primarily, and relatively simple logic at that, the kind the average person can understand (or easily learn): if x = r/c than 1000x = 1000(r/c) - if 50% equals the percent results are determined by chance then 50% of 1000 results should be chance determined. I'd like someone with a database to help me here too - it shouldnt be that hard to see how many hands are won by all but one Folding. And chance did not determine those results, people's actions did. The rest of my argument then reduces that number further till its clear that actions determine more than 50% of results. How many showdowns were heads up, 3 up etc... how often did the underdog win?

The other beauty about this argument is that it does not require a complex study of poker skill. Most of you guys are assuming skill must mean good play - in law it does not. The accountant doing a terrible job is applying HIS skill no less than the accoutant doing the excellent job. We dont have to show 50% of results are of good play.

We just, in my opinion, need to be able to show some actual studies which show that decisions account for more results than the cards. Now, who wants to help with the actual math?

Skallagrim