Luck vs. Skill test...

[drunkencowboy]

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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.

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Thanks for this analysis sir. Somehow, a few of the posts have gotten off track, talking about NLHE for example, and not thinking just how many blinds each player has in my example.

I realize no one wants to say Ivey is 100% guaranteed, but it is my opinion that he is in this situation, much the same way that Dwayne Wade would dominate me in heads up basketball (actually Ivey would probably dominate his opponent even more because I'd ever so often make some of my half court shots [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img] )

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Jesus f-in christ. this is the most retarded [censored] ive ever read. you think you would do better in basketball against dwayne wade than in poker against phil ivey. thats f-in hilarious. how about this: there is no luck in basketball and a large percentage of holdem is luck. you can try to factor out luck by saying people have 1,000,000 BB or whatever you said, but you can never eliminate it. sh*t. i can beat phil ivey half the time in limit holdem. hes not considered great at limit. you must just be horrible at poker if you will lose 100% of the time (you almost have to try to lose 100% of the time). if you say youre the average joe like you described in your example, then this is why you dont know what your talking about. you dont know poker and therefore its hard for you to answer (much less pose) a decent poker question...im pro, joe.

this is about as nice as i could say it. i think its much more interesting when you talk about NLHE and the opponents chances when moving all in. then you get a decent idea of how much luck is in poker.

peace wasnt trying to be rude.