Is poker a game of chance or skill? | Hacker News Reader

Is poker a game of chance or skill?

math.tau.ac.il

12 pointsquilby41 comments

Short summary, for anyone who already knows the basics of poker: yes, the cards are random, but everyone's bets are a function of their statistical competance and their ability to make inferences from other people's bets, and therefore poker is a game of skill. It's a fine article but it appears to contain very little new insight.

Wouldn't that mean that it is a game both of skill and of luck?

In much the same sense as stock market investing is "luck": randomness is present, but you're provided extensive tools to mitigate its impact.

So it's both luck and skills.

Yes, just like baseball, gymnastics, golf, skeet shooting, and jet travel.

Hardly a proper comparison.

Perhaps! But at least it's something we can attempt to discuss. As opposed to whether or not "luck" is a component in something, which is just a message-board dork argument.

You seemed to be the one who made the grand statement about it being a game of skills.

How is me saying that it's both skills and luck a message-board dork argument? Pray tell.

The point is that there are games that are not luck. Such as chess or go then there are games that are pure luck such as drinking games with highest card drink.

Since everybody already knows that games exist on a continuum from solvability to coin-flip randomness, you haven't contributed any insight to the discussion, but you're very intent on demonstrating to us all that you know that the continuum exists, and that at least 2 games you can name exist on the far end of that spectrum.

Is there anything that isn't? Sure poker has more luck than other things, but to just boil it down to simply saying 'luck and skill' seems wrong.

Chess

Hey, message board geek? (And, I'm calling you that because it takes one to know one.)

We know there are things that have little to no luck involved in them, and things that have a lot of luck in them. Yes: there is more "skill" (let's not have the message board geek argument about what that word means) in chess.

Exactly what is the point you're trying to make?

That your conclusion is wrong. The correct conclusion would be that Poker is a game of both luck and skill.

I fail to see why that is by any metrics message board geeky but fair enough if that is what it is then by all means...

I'm sorry. I've mishandled this. What I should have said to begin with is, "Yes, ThomPete, you are right, and I was wrong. Poker is a game of both skill and luck. Thank you for clarifying that for all of us; it would have been terrible indeed to let stand the incorrect notion that luck was not a factor in poker."

I see your point

In a wider sense yes.

But to a set of skilled poker players the value of the cards are relatively immaterial; they will play the averages and the other players.

One of my friends (a hardened player) once put it like this:

The cards are simply there to settle those times when players call bluffs to the end

I think the better question is how much of each? 50/50 is a lot different than 70/30, but I wonder if there's any good way to measure it?

After all, like so many games, the random variation can mask the effects of skill and you can only measure your skill relative to that of your opponents (so a good player against newbies might destroy them, while a superb player against good ones might only get a little ahead).

There isn't a simple, definite answer to this question because the skill of the players affect how much luck determines the outcome. Unskilled players are much more likely to bluff, call bluffs with weak hands, and over or underestimate their hands. In a low stakes, beginners game, there's enough variability that one player with a little more skill won't have much of an advantage. In a professional tournament, the best players show up in the top spots time and again.

Exactly...the new internet based players are, generally speaking, very loose players, and have really change the game in the non internet world. And I'd reckon that a very large percentage of entrants into physical tournaments now are internet trained players, and if you have a large enough % of these people starting, and all (hyperbole) of them "swinging for the fences", a lot of them are going to get through just on luck, but different ones each time.

Whereas, you will generally see at least one or two of the top 20-30 "old school" people at the final table of any major tournament.

It's actually both. A game of chance is one is which outcomes are mostly/strongly based on...chance. A game of skill is one in which skill is an influencer on the results. Poker is both.

This article is correct, mathematically, from what I can tell. However, the author seems to not understand the meaning of skill.

Apparently to the author a skilled player is one who knows and plays all the odds correctly whereas an unskilled player plays randomly, or sub-optimally. If all players are equally knowledgeable of all the probabilities involved, then the game is a game of luck.

A true game of skill is one in which there is no luck factor. No matter the relative skills of the players, the most skilled player will win. For example, boxing is a game of skill. Poker is not. Two grand masters of poker playing against each other, the result will be determined by the cards. They might as well play Candy Land instead.

Exactly. Chess is another example.

There is a good article about luck in chess here: http://www.chessninja.com/migonchess/migonchess005.htm

To quote a bit:

There is no "chance" on the chessboard, the pieces don't move by themselves. ... However, "extraordinarily improbable" things happen all the time.

I think you are forgetting the element of psychology that enters in to poker.

While it's true that all the top players understand the odds equally well there are some players that are still considered better poker players as their ability to read other players is better tuned. That's the skill element.

They might as well be playing Candyland? Not really.

The luck of the cards tends to even out over time-- this is why tournaments consist of a large number of hands.

I'm not sure of the specific numbers with Poker, but an expert Cribbage player tends to win about 55% of the time.

That's not exactly correct. Poker is a game of probabilities, which means that it has built in varience, which people call "luck". In a game of poker where two "grand masters of poker" play againt each other in a vacuum (i.e. one tournament, or one hand, or whatever you want), the result may be determined by the cards alone. HOWEVER, as is the nature of varience and probability, given a sufficiently large sample of hands/tournaments/sessions, the better player WILL converge to be a winner. The margin by which he is a winner will be determined by his skill.

Prior to focusing primarily on startups and entrepreneurship, I spent a lot of time playing a lot of online poker. I've put in close to a million hands over a few years at the micro/small stakes, and I've seen bad beats, I've had bad beats, I've put on bad beats, which can all be attributed to "luck", and the swings of the day can be attributed to luck, but over the entire life time of my game, you can certainly see gradual improvement that can be attributed to skill.

When we look at televised tournament poker (not shows like Poker After Dark / High Stakes Poker, where the players need only to have the sufficient buy in and/or be invited to participate), it is not particularly surprising to see the same "grandmasters" (or pros, or whatever oyu want to call them) appear over and over again. Yes, they don't win every tournament, or every hand, or every session, but in the long term, they do win (assuming they don't start playing poorly).

Wouldn't that would mean an accumulation of grand masters that would then by an large win all tournaments in the long run. Is that in fact what is happening?

Gus isn't winning every tournament. That might be due to the fact of other better players entering the game. But if your theory is correct wouldn't it mean that the more you play the better you become?

It would seem to me that a game where so much information is hidden from you and that information was randomly distributed luck is a bigger part than skill.

Phil Hellmuth has 11 WSOP bracelets and 75 "in the money" (ITM) finishes

Doyle Brunson and Johnny Chan have 10 bracelets as well as 33 and 42 ITM finishes, respectively

Erik Seidel has 8 bracelets and 57 ITM finishes

Phil Ivey has 7 (two of which he got last year, and he final tabled at the main event as well) and 36 ITM finishes.

Daniel Negranau has 4, and 42 ITM finishes

and this is just in the WSOP. I'll leave the WPT tournaments to you to look up :-)

I don't know what's going on with Gus, I don't really follow poker much anymore, but I know he's still a formidable player, even if he's not winning as much as he used to. That being said, Gus isn't someone I'd consider a "grandmaster"

Playing alone does not make you better unless you strive to improve (this, at a high level means, learning. playing != learning in the game of poker. playing is definitely crucial, but you really need to review and study the hands and the players post mortem. This is very similar to chess, imo.)

The younger players coming in (i.e. Tom Dwan) have the stamina and energy to put in _serious_ hours that allow them to improve and adapt much quicker and faster than older players, it's just the nature of the beast.

Just because there is an element of chance doesn't mean it's not a "true" game of skill. Sites like pokertableratings.com and sharkscope.com keep track of cash and tournament winnings, and maybe 100k hands gives a good sample that overcomes variance.

Poker's become much tougher the last five years or so. Quite a few of the top players formerly played Starcraft, MvC2, Warcraft, backgammon, Magic the Gathering, chess, etc. at the highest levels.

That mentality does make the games profitable though.

I agree that the paper makes some naive assumptions. However, you seem to be equating poker to chess, which is a common but erroneous analogy.

Poker is a MUCH tougher game (dozens of orders of magnitude, depending on the variant) than chess. We have no idea how close to optimal any human is at the game. Similarly, computer opponents can only play well in very limited settings like heads-up, fixed-limit Hold'em, where the game tree is a reasonable size.

Also, it depends on the period of time that you're looking at. If two people play a single hand, it's almost entirely luck. However, as the paper argues (though again in a simplistic way), as the number of iterations increases, the CLT comes into play and skill wins out.

This is true, even for "grand masters" in poker. Tom Dwan has an open challenge to play him in 50,000 hands online. If his opponent is ahead after 50,000 hands, he will pay them an additional $1M. He's not doing this because he loves to gamble. He's doing it because he knows 50K hands are a sufficient sample size to significantly reduce the luck factor.

Do you think a game like backgammon is also luck?

It is much more so than chess.

I am not sure how you quantify toughness, but this is the worst use of "orders of magnitude" I've ever seen.

More so, since I have spent a nontrivial percentage of my life playing both games.

Size and complexity of the search space (i.e., the game tree). The tree is several orders of magnitude larger for poker than for chess.

I've spent a non-trivial percentage of my life both playing and researching AI for poker. See http://poker.cs.ualberta.ca/publications/billings.phd.pdf for an initial discussion on the differences between the 2 games' search trees. He notes that for 2-player, limit hold-em, the game tree consists of 1,179,000,604,565,715,751 nodes. The tree expands exponentially as you add players and different betting sizes. For no-limit and other real-valued variants like pot-limit, the game has an effectively infinite search space.

If I recall, there are more possible chess games than atoms in the universe. So even if you were to quantify toughness as number of possible decisions, it would still be completely off. However, in both those games, a lot of the plays would be ridiculous.

It's easier to try and measure toughness by the time/effort it takes to be competent or the best. In this case I would say chess is hands down much tougher.

Sure, the number of possible moves is huge in both games. However, it's more about the number of relevant moves at a given game state. Alpha-beta algorithms for chess can do a much more thorough search than their poker-specific extensions and related methods like MCMC.

I suppose if you're measuring difficulty of a game as how difficult it is for a human player to beat the current masters, then that seems a little unfair. Poker has been around for less than 200 years and the current variants are less than 100 years old. Chess has been around since the late 1400s according to the Wikipedia article. There has been a lot more research and time spent on chess, and the community is consequently much more mature and skilled.

Also, don't forget that when you're playing chess, you can see your opponents pieces on the board.

Right, that would be what I meant by the poker-specific extensions. Most chess algorithms use minimax to search the game tree. The UoA team has extended the basic minimax algorithm to other variants like miximax which can handle partial information and stochastic outcomes.

To clarify, before you were comparing a tree of every possible move in a chess game against the decisions in a poker game?

That has to be a joke to compare the games that way. Even here you mention number of relevant moves at a given game state. I have to be misunderstanding that. Bet/check/fold vs say half dozen candidate moves?

I've been assuming difficulty for a human the whole time, to attain any level of skill. Since the chess community/theory is more established, it's going to be a more difficult game.

You are indeed misunderstanding.

A game tree search is not defined by the available options for the very next move. It's about the total possible paths to the end. In this case, poker is a much larger tree. Read the intro section of Darse's PhD dissertation that I linked to above and you'll understand.

There is luck involved in boxing. There is much less luck involved in boxing than there is in poker, because poker is a game that is about managing risk and uncertainty.

Chess and Go may be "pure skill" games, but there are very few popular games, sports, and practices that are similarly pure, and so the notion of how valuable or important "skill" versus "luck" is becomes murky.

Imagining games to have a "skill component" and a "luck component" is the wrong way to conceptualize games which involve randomness. A much better way conceptualize these games is to consider how many "units" (games, matches, hands, tournaments, whatever) must be played before the distribution of players by (score/place/points) becomes indistinguishable from that expected based on the players' ability levels.

For instance, if a GM rated 2800 plays a GM rated 2700, he may lose. In fact, he may lose several games in a row. However, if the two play a 30-game match, the probability that the 2700-rated player will win is very low.

Now, if you take the best heads up no limit hold em player in the world and have him play a series of hands against the hundredth-best heads up no limit hold em player in the world, he may very well lose the first hand. He may very well be down after the first thousand hands. But if they play, say, 1,000,000 hands, the probability that the weaker player will be up on the stronger player is as low as, if not lower than, the probability that the 2700 will beat the 2800 in their match.

It's not about "skill" versus "luck"--the question is simply, "How many (hands/games/matches/etc.) must be played before the probability that the weaker player (has won/is ahead/etc.) becomes sufficiently small?

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