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Comment by dghughes | Hacker News Reader

I worked in a small casino. The cockiest players were the Hold Em poker players. Most were in their 20s. They saw it as a skill not gambling and certainly not an addiction at least any I spoke to didnt.

The slots players were never satified. They were excited to spend $100 and win $10. Or win many small wins and play it all away since it wasn't real money to them. It was staggering at times to see people in one evening spend $100K casually and could no problems. Others not so much but the majority just dabbled.

I gave up computer gaming before the loot box trend. But I could see its popularity. I went back to school and many 18 - 25 year old guys talked about it constantly. It was very obvious in its popularity.

With slots just like US military training is stimulus response reward. I've been caught up in simple games from their hold a past time a dopamine rush. It's that 3% of people who can't turn it off that get hit the worst.

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Poker is different than most other games in that you are not competing against the house. You can never ever beat the house (in the long run).

Which is okay in poker because you win your money from other players.

You don’t have to be “good”. You just have to be better than the next person at the table (and sufficiently better to outrun the house take).

Poker is a skill. It's one of the only casino games where you can consistently make money. You're not playing against the house, you're playing against other people. There's no such thing as a professional lottery player, or a professional slot machine player.

If you're really good at poker, it can be a source of income. You have to be really, really good though.

Why would someone would spend $100K at a small casino vs. somewhere like Caesars Palace or Bellagio? At least you will get some nice comps. Was it better odds?

People just like playing slots. We had a crowd who just liked to spend lots and they won lots too since higher denominations had a higher payback compared to lower denomination. Usually 88% for penny slots but $1, $5, $10 (per line played mind you!!) are 96% to 98%.

I recall we had a few good looking people regulars who were in movies or TV or models not sure. One woman had on jeans that cost more than I made in a year. Actual diamonds for the decoration on them. They spent piles of money and on drinks.

It was amazing to see especially in small town Canada with a population of no more than 70,000.

And yes our comps sucked mainly due to laws on free booze or encouraging gambling. The odds/payback are industry standard it's all highly regulated here as other casinos. PAR sheets only allow so much adjustment.

You might want to feel like the biggest fish in a small pond and not a middle-sized fish in a big one.

You could avoid being in Vegas which is a plus

poker is a skill.

it is also gambling, but it's certainly very achievable to be a profitable poker player with a bit of study & practice

Proper holdem skill involves so much math that it makes chess seem like a more relaxing game in comparison.

Especially since 2015 when public nash solvers became available that calculate equilibrium strategies across the whole game tree (previously they only did preflop)

I have a blog dedicated to the topic

www.livepokertheory.com

I would stop short of saying it’s more math or more complex than chess though . The math to code a solver is hard but using one to improve at the game is easy. Most top poker pros are not mathematicians nor do they need to be. Poker is also many mixed strategies so often it doesn’t even matter what you do as long as you don’t always do the same thing

But yes it’s both a skill game and a gambling game and currently my primary source of income

Thanks for sharing your blog, I've been looking for something like your trainer to help me strengthen my math.

This is just not true, you don't need a lot of math to play poker at a top level.

I dont think hold em is equivalent to gambling. It is definitely a skill/game. It has an element of randomness just like most board games for example, but it's not gambling

You're creating a false dichotomy. Poker is a skill and it is gambling.

The original parent thread did the same thing, so I'm not surprised the answers follow suit.

> They saw it as a skill not gambling

The players see it as a skill I don't. It's gambling and I saw the result daily of people who spent too much or were in bad state from addiction. We had counsellors walking the floor there monitoring people, and the casino (Security) would ban people, or they can self-exclude themselves.

I'm not surprised by the comments here I know the type I was around them every day. Even the dealers are like that, it's like a cult. Yes I know a person can make money if they are good at playing but as others commented it's because others are so bad. So to me that means not so much skill as it is being the one who sucks least.

>I'm not surprised by the comments here I know the type I was around them every day.

I think most of the comments here are acknowledging it as a skill, but that 99.99% of gamblers for those poker type card games aren't skilled. It's not mutually exclusive.

I'm sure it's like how Blackjack can be a skilled game (or used to be) but I doubt most clients are going in 21-style with a plan to count cards and find the hot tables.

Blackjack is also the most profitable table game in the house (ignoring slots for overall profit). For Texas Hold Em profit is basically just the rake (depends on the pot) and how fast a dealer deals and how fast players will play.

Those card shuffle shoes at the table? Cost $20K each and have be rented I forget the daily rate. The small plastic prism the dealer pushes his cards against to they can see their suit? Leased as well at something like $10/day. If you want to make piles of money invent something a casino needs and lease it to them never sell it!

Just consider the money involved. The table has at least two dealers per shift one on break one dealing. Another reason staff hate card tables high tips to dealers (ignoring all other staff help) and more breaks than any other hourly job. At least one supervisor there at all times. A pit boss who manages overall. The manager of tables or slots (could be both). Security office plus supervisor to deliver chips and take cash boxes away when full and to keep people from getting too crazy which is 99% of the time with table games. Surveillance usually two trained on table games the watch up there overhead via cameras ($20K to $50K each) for one area plus their supervisor and manager. Facilities to clean the area of any food or mess. Servers who server food and drinks.

So it is probably costs $200 - $300/hour to run that blackjack table just on wages alone. Blackjack would make far more per hour in profit.

> I dont think hold em is equivalent to gambling

Hold’em (assuming the bets are money, obviously friendly games are possible) is 100% gambling.

> It is definitely a skill/game.

While some regulatory regimes either treat gambling different or not-gambling where a particular criterion for skill involvement is met, that’s not really material outside of consideration of the application of those regulatory regimes.

> It has an element of randomness just like most board games for example, but it's not gambling

Betting money on board games (whether or not you are also playing and betting on yourself), even those with no random element in the game itself (or nothing beyond side/turn-order selection), is gambling, too.

Where there is randomness, even if the game is largely skill-based on its face, playing for real stakes and the selection process it creates will result in games tending to be more dominated by chance than the game structure itself would suggest unless participation is mandatory and matching is random. (Even when there is not randomness in the game on ita face, as random and out-of-game events that effect player performance can’t be eliminated.)

Is gambling's issue its addictiveness, or its luck-based nature?

If I recall correctly, randomness is a great way to get people addicted and engaged more.

In Pocker there is a clear correlation between your actions and your results. The other people are clearly better than you are and most get the hint after a while. It's also slow enough so you get some time to think

Engineered randomness (like slot machines or loot boxes) use the means of technology and presentation to dangle that bit price juuust outside your reach. They also use flashy lights and fast paced games to get you in the "zone" of gambling more and longer.

> In Pocker there is a clear correlation between your actions and your results

Years ago I was okay-ish with Poker (positive net outcome after about 20k hands on pokerstars) and I'm not so sure about this.

I mean it's statistically true, and calling Poker a pure-luck game is like calling golf a pure-luck game because of wind. But to me the addictiveness of Poker is pretty "Skinner Box like" -- you can literally do nothing wrong, do the theoratically best moves, and still lose hard.

Of course if you did the same move every time in the same situation, it would eventually pay off. But if people are so reasonable addiction wouldn't be a problem in the first place?

I'm not sure why you put the pure-luck-or-not aspect on par with the addictiveness. People can get addicted to winning, regardless of if it's due to their skills or just luck.

The problem with e.g. slot machines is that anyone can win, with the same odds, so it's easy to get addicted to it. You can't get addicted to winning at golf unless you're already putting the work to get good at it. With slot machines you can win, without doing any work. That's the catch.

> With slot machines you can win, without doing any work

Uh, this is the exact my point. With Poker you can win, without doing any work, for one hand or even one night. You can't win forever, but gamblers are not famous for their long-term thinking ability.

And I didn't put the pure-luck-or-not aspect on par with the addictiveness. Actually I opened this conversation with this:

> Is gambling's issue its addictiveness, or its luck-based nature?

It's the luck based nature. The addiction is because you have inconsistent results despite consistent inputs. Humans like to learn, problem solve and pattern seek. Luck based reward systems subvert that but random games tease that part of our brains that it is possible to figure out the pattern if we just do a few more experiments with inputs.

I dont know if it's an issue, but what characterizes gambling for me is indeed the randomness. Otherwise we would literally call any game "gambling". I'm not even sure I would put sports betting in the same bucket as gambling.

I love poker, and it is definitely a skill game. It's also definitely gambling though. It just doesn't have the same addictive feedback loop that slots do.

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