How My Son's Insight May Have Saved Poker

[Hockeyfreak]

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100 pros with 5 or 6 years experience. 100 amatuers who learned 1 to 6 months earlier and have been playing regularly since. each plays heads NL Hold-em up with something signifcant to them at stake. Do it 100 times. I believe the results would be hard to argue with.

On a lighter side, why not make it count? Have 100 pros play 100 amatuer illegal poker advocates in a match of the same format. If the pros win more than 65%, poker will be legal, if not it will be illegal. I would easily stake a limb on that outcome.

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hahahah great idea!

[alphatmw]

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Umm exactly... you've proved my point now. It then becomes the game of skill with reverse goals which is the same as the normal game. But the point is you can guarantee to lose if your opponent is trying to win and that's the bottom line, which applies to poker, and you didn't prove anything so far. You haven't provided a single good argument on any of your cases thus far.

[/ QUOTE ]you can't even understand any of my arguments. do you really think i was disputing that hockey is a game of skill? reread my posts, reread your own posts, and figure it out.

here's a hint. YOU said that hockey is a game of skill because you can guarantee loss by scoring on your own goal. but i said if the other team also scores on their own goal, you can no longer guarantee loss. now figure out why there is absolutely nothing you can say to counter this point.

[J_B]

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I'm sorry, I just don't understand your argument Mr. Sklansky. Surely, in games of luck, one can make decisions to ensure a negative outcome. Blackjack is the perfect example. In the long run, Blackjack is a game where skill improves your chances of winning but in the long run you lose. You can easily cause your own destruction by betting on 17, splitting with 6's against dealer 10 showing etc.

Therefore, your litmus test for skill doesn't hold up.

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Sorry, but you are mistaken here. The more decks in the shoe, the more +EV it can be for the player. A good card counter could take the casino for everything it had. That's why card counters are kick/banned from casinos.

If you had 10 poker players at a table and hard the cards shuffled exactly the same way for 10 iterations, not moving blinds and each player having amnesia from the last hand and each player having the same stacks as the previous hand and so on and so forth, would the outcome be the same each hand?
What if this were golf, hockey, or baseball?

[rakemeplz]

alphamtw, I think your roulette argument is a bit silly, how do you guarantee a loss in roulette without having a chance at winning big, thats sort of the point of roullete?

although I see your point that there are probably lots of stupid bets/ betting strategies in casinos where you'll lose your money fast.

[gettinpoorer]

I think that people are making the poker is a skill game argument unnecessarily difficult. If poker is a game of chance, over the long run, a player at best will lose money in the amount of the rake. I'm sure statistical analysis of a community of players over a long enough trial would surely flesh out the fact that some players will not only beat the rake, but turn a profit over the long term. The only variables that can account for the difference in performance across players over time has to be the quality of play. Games like chess and backgammon can be similarly analyzed, while games like craps, roulette, and blackjack prove can't. The fact that there is a skill element to games like blackjack doesn't put it into the same category as poker.