"N.C. Court Rules Poker Is a Game of Chance"

prophet73 · #1 05-03-2007, 04:29 AM

CardPlayer Article

Are the people of North Carolina THAT illogical/gullible?

"The court chose to believe Thornell, who testified that he’s played poker for nearly 40 years. He told the court that although he feels there’s skill in poker, luck ultimately prevails. He specifically noted a hand that he watched on television that had a 91 percent chance to win lose to a hand than only had a 9 percent chance to win."

LOL. Man, America is in trouble.

This reminds me of those "Jay Walking" or whatever segments on Jay Leno.

GTL · #2 05-03-2007, 04:50 AM

holy crap. God help us all if they actually used the argument, a 9 percent shot actually happened, omg it's all luck.

TylerD · #3 05-03-2007, 04:59 AM

Oh my.

ZeeJustinaments · #4 05-03-2007, 05:45 AM

Well, when you have a court willing to side heavily with a redneck booze cop named DICK Thornell (who saw a hand on TV at least one time), what more can you expect? We'll keep having idiots who know nothing about the game making decisions for us, it's just the way it is.

strongsauce · #5 05-03-2007, 06:59 AM

Well you see 9% is pretty close to 0% so it may as well be the same thing! It's like those polls that state there is a 20% chance of error.

SixT4 · #6 05-03-2007, 08:27 AM

How hard is it to realise that the skillful player who got his money in with a 91% chance of winning will take it down 91 out of every 100 times. 9 times out of 100 he will lose.

91 times > 9 times. Therefore he will win if he does this x number of times, where x is a sufficiently large number.

stigmata · #7 05-03-2007, 08:39 AM

he did see it on TV

BostonMetro · #8 05-03-2007, 08:42 AM

How do you know that the more skillful player had the best of it? How do you know that the guy who had the worst of it didn't make a good call based on the range of hands of the other guy?

I hear people on this site (in the forums where there are actually people over the age of 18 posting) belittling people for talking about results over fewer than 100,000 hands. "haha, you have to play x trillion hands for the luck to even out!". Well, guess what folks, the average person who plays poker and still has a balanced life should probably play about 10,000 hands over his/her entire life. Yeah, that's about 300 hours in a card room. And yeah, their success in the game over that time will depend almost entirely on luck.

The court isn't ruling on whether skill plays a role when you are playing 1,000 a day multitabling for 10 years. They couldn't conceive of a world where people would want to do that. You have to be more reasonable and see that the for majority of the people in the world who play poker ... LUCK not SKILL will determine their success.

7n7 · #9 05-03-2007, 09:17 AM

Ack! I wish I hadn't read this right before going in to work. Now, Ima gonna' be pissy all day.

This is total ignorance of the game, and ignorance in general.

Ack! Why'd I read this? Ack!

BostonMetro · #10 05-03-2007, 09:26 AM

No, I understand why you would be upset, but it is simple math. (I have no problem admitting that players who play hundreds of thousands of hands use skill, not luck, to win or lose.)

Here is a simple way to model it:

There is a ten handed poker game. 5 players are sharks, 5 are donks. The game runs for a million hands. The 5 sharks are slight faves in the game. The 5 donks are slight dogs. But (and this is the key part) the "donks" are not one person. They are composed of hundreds of people who rotate in and out of the game playing 50-100 hands. Over this stretch, they may win or lose, but the additive donk will lose badly over the long run.

In this way, the experienced sharks use skill to win over the long run, but many many more inexperienced donks win or lose (probably lose) using luck over the short run. That is, for most players who play poker, luck is the key factor. Only the "additive donk" loses due to his lack of skill. But this isn't one person, and the government is trying to protect the individuals I guess.

In this way, poker is both a game of skill and luck. But the reason many people on this site make money is because they have made a commitment to the game - both to 1) learn to play well and to 2) play a lot of hands. So poker is a game of skill to "good" players and "luck" to bad players.

I challenge anyone to prove me wrong. However, none of this goes to show why the gov't doesn't come together to determine whether the [censored] lottery is a game of luck or skill. They don't really care who gets [censored] there, apparently. Partly because the winner is the state.