admin Recently I found myself caught up in the age-old debate; Is poker a game of luck or a game of skill? Most people would agree it is both. However, my debate started when an acquaintance who has never played poker once in his life declared that buying into a $10,000 poker tournament was no different than buying $10,000 worth of lottery tickets. In other words, it is 100% luck.
This is obviously not true. If poker were only luck, how could you explain certain players winning much more than chance would allow? Just by allowing folding, the element of skill is added. If I do nothing more than fold poor starting hands, I should be able to slightly improve my winning percentage. Add to that the ability to influence others decisions through different betting strategies and poker is clearly a game of skill to some extent. But it begs the question; what percentage of poker is skill?
The problem with this is that it depends. If you are talking about a single poker hand, luck is much more of a factor than when you are talking about an entire session or many sessions as a total. In a single hand you have to be lucky enough to be dealt a good starting hand and be lucky enough that some else wasn’t dealt a better one. If you are dealt KK you wouldn’t consider it lucky if the player to your left was dealt AA on the same hand. However, you could still “get lucky” and hit a king on the flop. Even in a single hand, skill is a factor. One can outplay an opponent. It also takes skill to get the most value out of a winning hand and to know when to get away from a losing hand. But, over longer sessions is where skill really shows through.
In a casino there are many different games played. Poker is played in most casinos now, but it is unique when compared to other casino games. In every other casino game you are playing against the house. In poker you are playing against the other players. No one ever claims the casinos are “lucky” to win so much money. Luck has nothing to do with it. Every game in a casino, from slots to roulette, is set up so the house has a slight statistical advantage. If the house wins only 51% of the time, they are making money. Over many wagers it is a guarantee that the casino will win more than they will lose.
So it is in poker. A skilled poker player need only win more than he loses. No poker player wins every hand, but many win more than they lose. The more skilled the player, the wider the gap will be between amount won and amount lost. Over thousands of hands, luck is not part of the equation; the same way a casino takes luck out of the equation. It may not be possible to measure exactly what percentage of poker is skill in general. However, over many hands, it is possible to measure the percentage of wins due to players skill as compared to the skill of his opponent. If there was no skill involved the win percentage would move closer and closer to 50% the more hands that are played. Anything over (or under) 50% would then be attributable to skill (or lack of skill). For the well skilled player, poker may not even be considered gambling.