Is Poker Skill or luck?

There are 52 cards in a deck. In the short term luck will play a part. But if a player depends on luck to win at poker for long term then it won't happen. To win long-term one needs to understand and play the game with an advantage (or edge) over other less experienced players. The more a person plays hands the more luck has less to do with their overall outcome and so they will have only their skill, knowledge, and level of experience to rely on to be successful.

Poker requires superior levels of confidence, skill, and patience from players in order for them to even begin to grasp the numerous complexities of the game before ‘beating it.’ A player must spend countless hours studying the game through books, watching other great players play, and then playing themselves. Like anything else in life, practice makes perfect. Luck itself is a very flawed concept to grasp and so a person must keep in mind that poker is about numbers; if I have at least the mathematical edge of .0000000001% over my opponent for the majority of hands that I play then I will make a profit in the long run. This requires a certain skillset to even be aware of your advantage over others, let alone gain one.

Compared to games like Chess, Poker does allow room for mistakes and for mistakes to play against a player himself but of course, an inexperienced player would have to be very lucky to gain an advantage like this or to win against an experienced player.


DISTINCTION BETWEEN SKILL AND LUCK IN POKER [Examples Included]:

One strong distinction between luck and skill in poker (and almost in any game) is that skill is a relative concept in a competition. For example, when I beat my inexperienced friend again and again it indicates that I have more skill than he or she does; the hands I lose are almost always going to be hands in which I was unlucky in. For example, if I hold Ace-King off-suit in my hand and my friend, who is my opponent at the time, holds an Ace-two off-suit, which is a weaker holding than Ace- King, then my correct move at the time would be to raise or re-raise my opponent 3-4 times the pot or push all-in (especially after my opponent has shown weakness before my action through his bet sizing, posture, and previous hand errors made by him). When I decide to move all-in and my friend makes the wrong decision by calling, he would then manage to spike a 2 on the river of a board that paired neither any Aces or Kings, which would essentially be his one outer that he needed to win the hand with; Board: 7-7-Q, 10, 2. My opponent, whose hand was dominated, was lucky enough to spike a 2 on the river to beat my Ace-King, which was the better hand at the time. Now statistically, Ace-King off suit holds up against Ace-deuce off suit 71.89 % of the time, which would require the less fortunate player holding Ace-deuce off suit to have to get lucky 23.15% of the time to win that particular match between those holdings.

By contrast, my skill level is unaffected long term. Luck is simply the sum of the factors that people conceptually have been unable to measure. In cards, the identity of hidden cards isn’t measurable, though better inferences about the distribution of those cards might be made from observation and analysis of an opponents betting behavior and physical tells. Thus, relative equally (or similar) skill levels between opponents usually nullify (cancel out one another) and would allow for a greater chance for luck to play a role throughout the course of the game. For instance, if two highly exceptional and equally matched players squared off for three hours and one was to get a string of good cards for two hours and 40 minutes while the other one only had good cards coming to him for 20 minutes then it would be more likely for the player who had a longer streak of good cards to win the match.

Thus, luck vs. skill in poker (or chess, spades, golf, or any other sport/game) is more of a function of whom you’re playing with and how well a person is able to make adjustments to their skill levels over time. A small exception to these functionalities sometimes can be seen in online poker penny-stakes games wherein luck is likely to predominate play because good players are usually unwilling to play at lower level stakes- therefore, usually weaker and inexperienced players are pitted against each other and must rely more on chance and lucky draws to win rather than a set of skills or experience that they don’t have. In high stakes game, luck will predominate except among well-backed (financially stable) players who don’t care much if they lose. Everyone wants to get into a game where they are one of the best two players in the game, which is a situation that obviously has no equilibrium (or guarantee to happen). With this being said, it is true that luck is most important in higher stakes games where there is more money on the line and where a good player must struggle and work harder to find an edge over other players who are as good or even better than him. Luck is least important in lower stakes games where players who are playing in lower stakes game are usually assumed to not have much money on the line to play for and therefore can afford to take bigger blows and swings from luck more than players playing at a higher level.

This leads to a final question as to which games should a player play in and not play in? One thing to keep in mind is that poker is almost all skill. Except at the very highest levels where it is almost all luck due to the almost equal playing field (and of course those players who play well enough to be considered exceptions above the rest). If picking your stakes and winning mostly in that game is not skill then almost everything is luck.

In a statistical study I referenced, Robert Hannum, a professor of risk analysis, studied more than “a billion hands of online Texas Hold’em” and found that “85.2 percent of the hands were decided without a show of cards. In other words, players’ betting decisions were of overwhelming importance in determining the outcome. Players bet to protect the pot from being won by someone else who may decide to bluff or try to catch cards if given a good price to stay in the pot or to gain value out of potential callers when he knows he will have the best hand at showdown. Of the remaining 14.8 percent, almost half were won by a player who didn't hold the best hand but instead had induced the player with the best hand to fold before the showdown (1).” And so, with this information from this study, Hannum came to the conclusion that skill was “clearly the driving force behind the economic outcome of Texas Hold’em” rather than luck.

When I read this data I compared it to another source of data that pretty much pointed toward Texas Hold’em being the opposite of skill and was all luck. I came to find out that this report happened to be a report on limit hold em rather than no limit hold em but still proved to be a relatable experiment. “In 2012, I wrote about a study in the Journal of Gambling Studies, which argued that poker isn’t the game of skill that many players make it out to be. In the experiment, 300 participants were divided into “expert” versus “non-expert” groups, depending on whether they had an interest in the game or not. Then, they played 60 hands of Texas Hold’em in which the deals were fixed, so that players could get consistently good, bad or neutral hands. In a nutshell, the researchers found that there wasn’t much difference in the final amounts of money that the experts accrued compared with the non-experts, with the implication that skill level didn’t have much effect on the outcome. In other words, they argued, poker is a game of luck (2).”

My dispute with this experiment is that this information was only tested only on one or two sessions of poker and so this does not compare to other good sources of evidence that proves poker to be more of a skill game than luck. As I said before, good players who focus on skill rather than the luck aspect of the game should expect to win long term rather than short term. The author above only describes evidence that he gathered off of a short-term time of players playing poker. “60 hands” should not have sufficed as enough evidence to determine that poker was more luck than skill and so I stand by my original argument.

Limit hold em has a large amount of skill involved. Unlike in no-limit holdem where a large amount of skill requires experience and knowledge about various aspects, limit hold em skill depends more heavily on knowing your pot odds and essentially your draws due to the cap on bet sizes after each round of betting. From what I’ve experienced, I will say that no limit hold em requires about 65% of reading your opponents and 35% of knowing your pot odds. In limit hold em, however, it’s about 15% reading your opponent and 85% knowing your pot odds. I believe an exceptional player can destroy a limit game having pod odds mastered, especially at loose middle stakes. For example, if I have a hand like 5-4 suited, 6 callers, and the small blind flips his hand face up (showing pocket aces) and raises then I will call. There’s nothing an opponent can do (or show me in this case) to get me to fold my hand in most cases because I have great odds of drawing to or hitting a straight, flush , or even a small two pair. I know the player with aces, who is probably less experienced than me, will bet all the way if I hit what I need and the rest of the callers most likely would not have caught anything assuming they did not have such a draw heavy hand like mine. Because of my straight and flush possibilities as well as a fixed bet limit for me to call down, thus giving me the right price nearly every time, I will crack aces more than usual if given the right price down to the river. If it were a no-limit game where the player could pre –flop shove all-in or simply make a large enough bet against me then he would essentially be pricing me out of the hand and forcing me to fold especially when I have a hand like 5-4 suited where its not conceivable to risk all of my money, but of course this is where luck and skill come into play to recognize these situations and make subtle adjustments.


Articles used- 

1. http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-05-19/good-poker-players-aren-t-lucky

2. http://www.theguardian.com/science/head-quarters/2015/jan/14/poker-game-skill-luck-cepheus-bot-program