help on proving poker is not about luck

[SamIAm]

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I think the "making a living" aspect is a pretty good arguement.

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I think it's an awful argument. If some casino was paying 3:1 on roulette bets on black, I could make a living playing it. That doesn't mean it's suddenly a game of skill, just because it's +EV.

On a similar note, if the poker room suddenly started charging 10x rake, it'd kill your ability to make a profit. That doesn't change the amount to which luck is a factor.

[PantsOnFire]

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I think the "making a living" aspect is a pretty good arguement.

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I think it's an awful argument. If some casino was paying 3:1 on roulette bets on black, I could make a living playing it. That doesn't mean it's suddenly a game of skill, just because it's +EV.

On a similar note, if the poker room suddenly started charging 10x rake, it'd kill your ability to make a profit. That doesn't change the amount to which luck is a factor.

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Those are some pretty unrealistic "ifs".

But whatever, the "making a living" point of view has worked for me when explaining poker and skill to friends and family.

[Paul2432]

If you have MS Excel create a table with the following columns headings: Hands, Expected Win, Lower Limit, Upper Limit.

In the hands columns fill in 0-500,000 at 10,000 hand increments.

In the expected win column put in your expected win. This will be (hands/100)*(win rate). I would enter your win-rate in a seperate cell that you reference so you can change it easily.

In the lower limit column enter (expected win)-2*(square root(hands/100))*(standard deviation). You can use a different number of standard deviations if you like, but 2 is standard.

In the upper limit column enter (expected win)+2*(square root(hands/100))*(standard deviation). You can use a different number of standard deviations if you like, but 2 is standard.

Now use the chart wizared to plot the expected win, lower limit and upper limit verus number of hands. You should notice that it takes quite a few hands for the lower limit to get above zero.

These graphs represent the range of results a player with the given WR and SD might experience. Note that it is not necessarily correct to then say that if you have expericenced these statistics that your true WR is within the range of the upper and lower limit.

Paul