How much skill is involved in poker?

YoungTrouble

Hey guys.Recently I started playing a bit of poker online.Just out of interest how much is it down to luck?

I know they hold championships and such,but can you actually be a great poker player?

Thanks.

zuutroy

In the long term skill is the only factor. In the short term, luck is a huge part of winning an individual hand or how you do in a single tournament.

The long term can be very long though. It's not unheard of for good players to break even for 100,000 hands at mid-stakes.

getzls

maybe 30% luck, 70% skill.

TrueCard

It's all skill. Key factors are intelligence and game selection. If you can't see the sucker at the table it's you.

CSU

...have been playing online for six months now and thinking about reading further into the maths of how this apparent 'skill' is found.

I hear pro's talking about percentages all the time and 99% of the time you'll hear a pro making excuses for the hand he/she just lost and they'd go into a mirrage of tech talk about how X could do this and how Y does this...

In my experience this last few months (as a n00b) it seems to me that you can't wrap any mathematical system around a process that is truly random in nature.

At this point in time I'm inclined to believe that poker (aside the obvious abilities, reading a players mood/intentions/history of what they do) is 99.9% luck.

I'm hoping someone here can prove me wrong on that and provide some good resource into the maths side of this game?

Gurgle

CSU wrote: »

you can't wrap any mathematical system around a process that is truly random in nature.

There's a field of maths called 'Statistics and Probability'. I recommend you look it up.

The only 'random' part of poker is the dealing of the cards. This determines who will win or lose if they're in the final call.

Skill is about knowing when and how to raise, call or fold.

Look at it this way, playing 1v1 you would win half the hands on random chance alone. Playing well is about ensuring there is more money in the pot on the ones you win.

Ardent

getzls wrote: »

maybe 30% luck, 70% skill.

In my experience it's the opposite. If the above was true you'd have the same players at the final table of the WSOP main event ever year.

It's no concidence that the best poker players are degenerate gamblers and, in most cases, confirmed bust.

zuutroy

/thread.

premierstone

Ardent wrote: »

In my experience it's the opposite. If the above was true you'd have the same players at the final table of the WSOP main event ever year.

It's no concidence that the best poker players are degenerate gamblers and, in most cases, confirmed bust.

Too funny to be true, your surely ripping the piss??

Gurgle

getzls wrote:

maybe 30% luck, 70% skill.

Ardent wrote: »

If the above was true you'd have the same players at the final table of the WSOP main event ever year.

If you understood the above, you wouldn't have posted this

jhegarty

Ardent wrote: »

In my experience it's the opposite. If the above was true you'd have the same players at the final table of the WSOP main event ever year.

It's no concidence that the best poker players are degenerate gamblers and, in most cases, confirmed bust.

Even if it was 1% luck you wouldn't get the same set of players at the final table two years in a row.

[Jackass]

I'm a terrible / novice poker player, but appreciate that when you play a good poker player, it's very difficult to play them.

It's all psychological. If he reads you have only a half decent hand by limping in and has watched and learned your habbits and has a bigger stack, he knows he can bluff you out every time.

Every game is different, every player is different, the only thing that remains the same are the cards, but class is perminanent, the same best players in the world win the big stacks. Occasional wild cards, but that's to be expected, everyone starts on equal footing.

Kenny Rogers summed up the skills best... You gotta know when to hold em, you gotta know when to fold em...

bladespin

A lot of it depends on where you play, low stakes online and you could be called on anything by a fish, and they will often get lucky, often it seems the more they have to loose the better they play, that's the key.

BTW if you think it's luck then there must be some very (and I mean very) lucky players out there consistently hitting final tables in tournaments.

[Jackass]

Having just this very minute lost an all in pre-flop heads up in an online game with a pair of aces to a straight 4,5,6,7,8 I'd like to withdraw my previous comment. It's 100% luck!!! :mad:

bladespin

[Jackass] wrote: »

Having just this very minute lost an all in pre-flop heads up in an online game with a pair of aces to a straight 4,5,6,7,8 I'd like to withdraw my previous comment. It's 100% luck!!! :mad:

Did they draw on a 4 and 8?;)

[Jackass]

No he had King and 6 off suit iirc. Should never have even called me, it was pre flop though and lead was chopping and changing a lot, still don't know why he called it though.

premierstone

[Jackass] wrote: »

No he had King and 6 off suit iirc. Should never have even called me, it was pre flop though and lead was chopping and changing a lot, still don't know why he called it though.

Its a bad beat, and they only occur when someone makes an error, the principle of poker is to make your opponent make mistakes, wp, ul it was a cooler.

People always quote certain hand histories or freak tournament winners as proof that poker is luck, its far too small a sample size, play 100,000 hands and luck will even itself about. Poker is a simple combination of probability, Maths, Physcology and Self Control.

[Jackass]

Ah I know, I was only messing about ALL poker being luck, it was just freaky that I made a post saying it's hardly anything to do with luck then got that beat!! haha

mulmot

play less hands, raise more when you play, and keep firing, see ya at the tables.

Wacker The Attacker

I've been on a run for days on end where I just cannot win a hand

Despite getting the money in with best hand more often than not the results do not reflect this and it is extremely frustrating.

Call Me Jimmy

I'm not a poker player (well very occasionally and only in Real Life (TM)) but how anyone can say its just luck is incredible. As others have mentioned, the cards you're dealt are the only 'random' things, but everybody at the start of a new round has equal chance of getting any single combination of cards, which means if it was luck there would be no consistent winners.

Having said that, the skill might be slightly overplayed. To do the best over time is to know the probabilities of certain outcomes and when the probability of a good outcome is lower minimise your loss, and when it's higher maximise your gains. This is where psychology comes in and for me is the most interesting part. I also think that people's ability to 'read' other players is hyped-up, usually by players themselves. You can't argue with results but I think a bit of ego comes into the way some players say they read someone, I don't think they are always as sure as they say they were.

I'm actually thinking of getting into it (not online because that is purely statistics) coz I had a very enjoyable game over christmas.