+Another Demonstration of Skill in Poker
My brother and I are continuing conversations about the amount of luck vs skill in poker. I am very proud and honored to be doing press on behalf of the PPA (www.pokerplayersalliance.org) and really get the word out there about how threatened this game is right now as well as how this new law is such an erosion of your right to privacy. And the arguments that poker is a skill game are so important to the stance since if we can prove that poker is all skill then illegalizing it would be like illegalizing baseball or chess.
So Howard, by way of David Sklansky, gave me this argument: 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. This is because there are no decisions to be made in either of these games so you cannot purposely lose and so these games are 100% luck.
What 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.