Luck or skill - how much?

[RevStu]

Ever since I started playing poker about nine months ago, I've had the view that the game is roughly 70% luck and 30% skill, and nothing's ever happened to change that. (Especially not my shitty luck in this afternoon's final...) I'm always surprised how vehemently some people disagree with this opinion, though, so I thought I'd take a straw poll. Now, I'm prepared to concede that in games for large stakes it might be a bit more weighted in favour of skill - as people are more likely to be susceptible to influence if their house is riding on it - but certainly in leagues like the LPL or small-stakes cash games I absolutely believe that if you don't get the cards (the cards themselves, of course, being totally a function of luck), there's precious little you can do about it.

30% is actually quite a big margin for skill (casinos operate on house advantages much, much lower than that, of course), but I think anyone who says it's more than that is pretty misguided. After all, how many bad beat/miracle escape stories does every one of us have?

Any views?

[GabeCoUk]

damn straight, I had 2 bad beats today (unfortunately NOT on small stakes).

Check out on General Forum.

[Cantona]

This question has 2 answers depending on whether your playing cash / ring games, or tournament.

If you play cash, you can play on skill and over time will make a profit, there is no ultimate win, only a winrate, and a skilled player will be consistant over time. Over time you beat luck. Its called variance!

If you play tournament, you need some luck, and depending on your stack size etc, you may have to take some less than favourable gambles every now and then, in which case luck is a factor. Also in tournament, (freezout), you cannot reload and come back to recover, so your game is over, and no amount of luck or skill will reverse that. You can lose all your money all in on the first hand at a ring game, and then go on to have a profitable session. Sometimes this in itself can be good luck, ( ie table image etc). That said a skilled tournament player will have good understanding of tournament strategy, a part of which is knowing when to ride your luck, and when not to. This assumes a blind system that is not bingo, obviously.

Either way its nothing like 30% in my book. If it were it would not be possible for people to make a living at it. as you would run a 70% chance of losing every time you sit down, and no bankroll could take that.

LPL - you may find that the blind structure isnt quite correct, and forces some coin flips more than it perhaps should, and you may also find that the skill level varires quite a lot, whereas in a "real" game skill has a correlation to stakes, (not always granted). Try sitting online and watching a £30/£50 cash game, on a satruday night after 11:00 pm. Its no fluke that 80% of the money goes to the same players.

[GUMSHOE]

LPL doesn't necessarily involve more luck than a money tournament, it's just that you have to avoid getting unlucky more often. By that I mean - due to the varying expertise of the players - you are more likely to get called when you make a move with the best hand. Then it's a case of avoiding bad luck. I also agree with the points raised by Cantona in relation to cash games v tournaments.

Having started playing the odd LPL game having previously played only for £££, I was concerned that it would be a complete crapshoot and while there are players who treat the game as such, I now know to avoid them when I can. If there was no skill involved, no one would ever make a bluff and I know from bluffing and being bluffed in LPL that this is not the case. The lesson to learn is to choose who you are bluffing against and when. That in itself is a skill that one acquires through watching the playing habits of others.

If you do not bluff or try to push people off hands now and then, you will only win when you have premium hands. People will soon know that you're betting only with the nuts or near to it and you will cease to get action, even in the LPL.

A true game of poker - and by that I mean for a reasonable amount of money - played by competent people is about 70%:30% skill over luck. LPL is probably more 50:50, maybe 40:60 in favour of luck in some of the games (Assembly for instance), but it's certainly not as low as 30% skill.

Rev, didn't you post on here not so long ago about making five final tables in a row? Was that ALL luck? I doubt it.

[RevStu]

No, it was clearly 30% skill...

Like I said, 30% is a pretty sizeable margin for a gambling game, certainly enough to separate reasonably competent players from idiots over an extended period of time (say, a month-long league). But the idea that tournament/small-stakes poker is 2/3 skill is still pretty laughable to me. How many coin-toss draws have we all participated in? How many times have even the players here who'd consider themselves pretty good gone all-in with AJo against pocket 8s (or vice versa) and just hoped for the best?

It's a gambling game with some skill, not a skill game with some luck. That's a large part of its appeal - any schmuck can get through a couple of satellites, get into a big game and beat the world's best if the cards are on their side. You couldn't walk into the Chelsea team tomorrow and score a hat-trick against Man Utd. Poker is so popular nowadays precisely because anyone can get lucky very early on. How often does the first-timer come to a league game and end up in the points? Pretty much always, as far as I can tell, because having barely a clue about the game is often more of an advantage than a little knowledge.

Sorry, not even nearly convinced yet. And, y'know, I've made six finals (not final tables, monthly finals) out of seven since I started playing, half of them when Bath only had two games a week. It's my own skill I'm denigrating here...

[RevStu]

Originally Posted by Cantona

Either way its nothing like 30% in my book. If it were it would not be possible for people to make a living at it. as you would run a 70% chance of losing every time you sit down, and no bankroll could take that.

Um, "70% luck" isn't the same as "70% losing", man. If we assume for the sake of argument that luck is evenly distributed over time, then 35% of the time luck will make you win, and 35% of the time it'll make you lose. Add the 30% skill to the 35% good luck and that's 65% winning, 35% losing - plenty of scope for profit there.

And anyway, what percentage of games do you have to cash in to make profit? I'd have thought the average prize money was several times the buy-in, so you could make a living by only cashing in, I dunno, 20-25% of the games you played.

[DonkBox]

Obviously the higher you go the higher the skill factor becomes and at the top level it's definitely around 70-30. however in the LPL i actually think it's probably closer to 50-50.

Also with regards to luck i think a bigger luck factor than winning your coin flips is whne your luck occurs. For instance getting a big hand, when someone else also has a big hand, only yours is slightly better and you get all their chips think set over set...

or picking up a big hand when the blinds are huge and doubling or tripling up as two short stacks find a playable hand.

also another hidden luck factor is folding a marginal holding - lets say a-9 UTG and you fold, and then the flop comes A-9-J . The hand goes to showdonw between two other players and you'd gone broke as someone else has a-j, you were potentially going to limp in that handbut decided against it, that initial bet of the big blind, would've cost you your entire stack. then 4 hands later you pick up queens, mateyboy who had the a-j in the previous had has A-K. you get it all in pre and they hold up. that hand wouldn't have occured if you'd folded and now you have the chips whereas mateyboy is out.

in short one hand can totally change the dynamics of a tournament, there was a famous example a while back in Vegas where a guy under the age of 21 final tabled a big tourney, they hadn't checked his age, before the tournament started. but how do you compensate the rest of the field? move everyone up one spot, or what?

and the above last hand indicates where the skill factor comes from folding hands that look pretty but aren't and get you in trouble.

i mean how many times is the hand that you actually exit on the hand that really hurt you, looking back i know from my experience that's it's usually misplaying a hand (chasing a flush?) that leaves me short and the hand i get knocked out on is a coin flip only because i'm short and have to shove in.

Last comment on the whole luck thing, naturally they say luck evens out but obv where and when it evens itself out is important. For instance you get your aces cracked by Q-10 at the final table of the WSOP LPL final and then put that exact same beat on someone else but it's in a regular league game.

[Cantona]

I think the point is that luck exists in the situational context, ie in a hand or a game etc. Over time skill has to beat luck, and therefore you should never consider yourself lucky or unlucky, rather skilled or unskilled. Before you play you have to accept that the cards will not always go your way, this is a god given fact and therefore not luck. Tournament play is more dependant on the situational luck, ( or avoiding the worst of it ), whereas cash play is less affected.

As in football you can be unlucky and get bad refereeing decisions and injuries etc, but the best team will always win a league, whereas a lucky team can win a cup.

On a seperate note, you should'nt judge your skill level by the LPL leaderboard, as it is not representative, due to the fact that players dont compete in the same number of events. If you calculate a player points per event then this would be more representative.

Variance defines the luck that you are talking about, and your not skilfull until your winning rate will overcome the variance rate. As a rule of thumb "they say" you should have a bankroll of 300xBB to cover maximum variance swing. And your win rate should be measured as a ratio of BB/hr. Tournament play is different again, and I am still undecided on the correct way to approach this in terms of bankroll and measuring win rates.

The newbies you speak of who do very well first time out, ( yes it does happen a lot ), do so because most players have a "game theory" strategy whether they know it or not, and do not have an alternative to use when up against the newbies. Typically, we see them win a few drawing hands, and then try to avoid them in the hope that someone else takes them out soon, and before you know it they have accumulated enough chips to draw out on you every time. Although the "Theory of Poker" (Sklansky) says that you will win if you have the best of it over time, this is not quite so true in a tournament situation where stack ratio is against you, and therefore the opposite when you have a deep stack and can afford to draw out moreoften if the pot is large regardless of the odds.

If you go online and watch the high stakes games, you will see that skill is far superior to luck, particularly when new players arrive that are less skillfull. The amount of "badbeats" at that level is much less than at the small stakes level. That cant be luck can it ?

Another thought. You cant be lucky forever, you can be skilled forever, (well if you live that long like me), and if you could measure your luck over a large enough sample it would be exactly 50/50, therefore it cancels out, so luck does not exist except in the macro moment.

If you consider that the odds of hitting a royal flush are @ 750000/1 then you couldnt measure luck untill you had played say 1000 x 750000 hands, and so any luck you speak of are unmeasurable in comparison to your sample size.

Certain online Casino's allow huge databases of hand histories to be made available to the stataticians who show that the EV for any given hand in any position has an EV value which is close to the theoretical EV. Note it is the influx of newbies playing badly that has distorted the Theoretical EV away from the Historic EV, but its still close.

So, in short, luck is not a factor you should consider or rely upon, but accept that it is present in every situational context, and play the long game, accepting that you cannot win every hand.

PS - None of the Chelski first team could score a hatrick agains Man Utd, are you mad man?

[RevStu]

Originally Posted by Cantona

Before you play you have to accept that the cards will not always go your way, this is a god given fact and therefore not luck.

If we're not counting bad cards as "luck", then I see why everyone thinks the game is about skill... What other kind of bad luck is there in poker apart from the cards not going your way? Getting pocket Aces while you're in the toilet and having them mucked?

As in football you can be unlucky and get bad refereeing decisions and injuries etc, but the best team will always win a league, whereas a lucky team can win a cup.

That's a fair point, but the question was specifically and explicitly directed at tournament/small stakes games.

The newbies you speak of who do very well first time out, ( yes it does happen a lot ), do so because most players have a "game theory" strategy whether they know it or not, and do not have an alternative to use when up against the newbies.

Hmm, not sure about that. We've all seen plenty newbies, after all. I think it's because first-timers haven't learned when to fold, and the more hands you're in the more chance you have of drawing lucky a couple of times and ending up with a big stack, which you then instinctively try to protect, hence surviving until the points.

If you go online and watch the high stakes games...

Like I say, that's a whole other debate.

[botherer]

The argument with which I have the most sympathy works thus:

In any hand, at any moment, poker is 90% luck, 10% skill. Knowing to play or not play the cards, betting well, using good strategy, getting a good read, etc, will fill up that 10%, while the 90 is taken care of by the bastard miracle card on the river.

However, over the course of say, a multi-table tourney, to get to the final table requires more than luck. It does of course require significant luck, but there has to be something else. Over the course of a tournament, perhaps it's Stu's original 30% skill to 70% luck.

But there must be a reason why the same players so consistently reach final tables in major tournaments. Sure, you get a Steve Danneman-a-like on a final table every time, but the rest are often familiar faces. Hellmuth et al haven't won 10 WSOP bracelets because they've surfed an improbable wave of 70% luck. So you can once again change the figures by increasing the length of time studied.

Over the course of a year, consistent wins and final tables perhaps indicates 70% skill to 30% luck. And then to carve a career, winning millions of dollars year after year - there's a reason why. It isn't because of a friendly gypsy curse or particularly potent card holder. By this point it has to be 90% skill to 10% luck, if not more. These are the best of the best, because they're *better* at it - they have significantly more skill.

Er, does that make sense?

John W