Out of Control

In a game of chance, odds win out over the long term and the performance of all players gravitates around a statistical mean that, graphically, could be represented as a classic bell curve. In craps, for example, all players who stick to pass and come bets, will, over the long term, see their net winnings approach 98.59 percent of their cumulative wagers, (accounting for the 1.41 percent house advantage). About two-thirds will see an outcome within +/-1 standard deviation of that mean; and 95 percent will end up within +/-2 standard deviations of that mean.

Although mathematical odds factor in poker, so do other aspects, including the the player’s overall experience, the ability to quickly calculate pot odds (the ratio of the bet relative to the size of the pot), and read other players’ hands (and make one’s own hand equally difficult to read). There’s no bell curve. Mathematically, a pair of aces, the best two-card starting hand in Texas Hold ’Em, will win 40 percent of the time. Yet some players can consistently win this hand more than 40 percent of the time, as well as other starting hands with much longer odds. That there’s a recognized group of elite professional poker players who consistently win year after year, just as in golf or tennis, itself belies the proposition that poker is largely a matter of luck.

It’s also a reason that poker, unlike roulette, slots and lotteries, attracts scholars, academics and players interested in the mechanics of statistics and game theory. The Harvard Faculty Club hosted one such “strategy session” in April, as reported in the Wall Street Journal and available from the Freakonomics site here.

Finally, another big indicator that poker is a game of skill is that, in a perverse way, you can intentionally play to lose, something you can’t do with roulette or lotteries. Pro player Annie Duke elaborates on her site.

Let’s say you have two players of equal skill who are playing a series of heads up matches. Over the course of the series they will end up just trading chips and whoever wins a given match or hand will appear to be completely driven by luck. The same would hold true for baseball. If the teams were equally matched skillwise then over a series of games they would split the results and which team one an individual game would appear to be determined by luck.

But now let's say that we have our two equally matched poker players and I lean into one of them and whisper in their ear that I want them to lose the next match as quickly as possible. The player would be able to do it, and fast. They could easily come up with a strategy that would insure that they lost (for example they could check fold every single flop). Baseball would work the same way. Remember the Chicago Blacksox?

The ability to purposely lose is a very definitive argument that a game is all skill. Notice that if I asked you to purposely lose at a roulette game or Baccarat game (where the house took no edge) you could not do it.

hat this shows, again, is that players really tend to over estimate how much luck there is in poker because they tend to be playing against very skilled players. In any skill sport, the closer the match up of skill between the opponents, the more luck there will appear to be. This is true even in a game that is all skill, like golf, baseball or, yes, poker too.