Reflections on Luck and Skill from the Part Time Poker Grind | Hacker News Reader

Reflections on Luck and Skill from the Part Time Poker Grind

thehobbyist.substack.com

103 pointsjjxw95 comments

His section on volume rings pretty true. I used to play a lot recreationally. And by "a lot" I mean probably on the medium-to-high side of recreational, but not even close to pro. Like attending every major regional event and attending WSOP every year for 10 years. Both cash and tournaments. I've stopped because of how much of a tiring grind poker is, and how much time you have to dedicate in order to make it financially rewarding. You need to play -a lot- to get good, and then you need to play a lot as a good player to make money. It is really a lot of work.

If you are not a winning poker player (in other words, your long term EV at the table is negative), you're just going to lose money on average, so playing more means losing more. It only makes sense to play in that case if you actually enjoy playing the game and treat your losses as the cost of entertainment.

But if you are a winning poker player, you still won't win enough to rely on the income unless you are playing A LOT. And by a lot I mean every day, for hours a day. And even more if you play online because the level of play is so much stronger online than live.

And then, even if you are a winning player, and you play a lot, AND you have enough average cash flow to make it worth it, you are still going to have periods where variance wipes you out and you're down for months straight. It's pretty brutal.

After all this time, I decided I'd rather get a different hobby than spending so much of my time grinding away in a smoky casino. I just play (infrequent) home games now.

It's the hardest way to make an easy living.

Thanks for your candid report. Not enough people tell it how it is, and everyone thinks they're special.

Fact is, a lot of top players also have deals on the side, with brands and ambassador things. I feel you need those deals to make up for the bad runs.

I love the game, but the variance can inflate egos and the grind makes other hobbies more attractive.

> Thanks for your candid report. Not enough people tell it how it is, and everyone thinks they're special.

That's a good point, too, one I failed to mention. A lot of people are losing poker players, but they don't know it. They don't keep records, and they don't manage and analyze their bankroll over time. A losing poker player has a negative EV. If you buy in to 20 $1000 tournaments, bink one of them for $15K, you're on top of the world, but guess what, you're a losing poker player. Cash players are even worse. They donk off $500 a night but only remember that time last week when they were up $5000 and cashed out. Congratulations, but your EV is still negative.

By my own measure, I was a losing poker player for most of my years playing the game, and I have a spreadsheet to prove it.

I thought this describes many gamblers: remember the wins, quickly forget the losers, be it pull tabs, blackjack, slots, etc.

It does, but there is a crucial difference between poker and most of those other forms of gambling, in that it's possible to be a long term winner at poker, as opposed to games that structurally favor the house. So, you have to be dumb to think you can beat slots long term; you merely have to be delusional to think you can beat poker long term.

A similar thing happens with stock and crypto traders. They do a ton of trading during a bull market and feel like a genius, because they bagged a few big wins, but they downplay all their big losses. At the end of the year and once short term capital gains are factored in, they end up making less than the total market index, but due to poor record keeping are convinced they’re some kind of trading savant. Once the market turns down they’ll likely lose it all and be forced to become a social media influencer selling bullshit trading courses to unsuspecting victims.

Yeah. It's difficult to keep track, especially in cash games. But to be pro is to treat it as a business. I completely agree.

I think a lot of what you said probably applies to day trading, too.

I was thinking this very thing. At the start of COVID I stuck 20k into a trading account. It went up, it went down, it went up again. But overall I'm probably about break even. Which is too say I did a shitload of researching, buying, selling, watching, worrying and waiting and paid myself a fat zero for all that wasted time and energy.

Volume is incredibly important for any truly serious endeavor. Bryan Caplan's excellent post Do Ten Times As Much makes the point succinctly. [1]

I've come to believe the real reason people shouldn't pursue these kinds of sports or games professionally unless they're born with a deep thirst for winning them is twofold. First, if you love it from day one, the chances that you're actually better than average are higher than they would be for a randomly selected person in the population (e.g. Nike CEO Phil Knight really was able to run a 4-minute mile in college).

But second, deeply enjoying the game makes the requisite 10 (20, 50, 100) thousand hours you need to become a true pro go much faster than for someone who's just putting in the reps, and it even gives you drive to do related things in the likely case that that doesn't pan out (e.g., Nike CEO Phil Knight did not become an Olympian after college, he instead sold Japanese shoes out of his car for half a decade or so as a side hustle to track and field meets across the country while working a day job).

[1]: https://www.betonit.ai/p/do-ten-times-as-much

I particularly agree with the second point. Having enough hours is absolutely necessary to grow into a pro. And the number of hours spent is a non linear function, in two perspectives, from my observation:

First, spending 10 1-hour session produces way less pro-ness than spending 1 10-hour session. Every programmer who attempts a difficult (pro) project can probably attest to this.

Second, not all X hours/days produce the same pro-ness. People have plateaus that seem to stuck somewhere. But you need those plateau X hours/days too. I have a theory that one can avoid as much plateau as possible by always challenging oneself with an almost impossible -- yet still doable project. But it's difficult to get right, so a lot of people get a very long plateau, or burnout, and then quit.

PS: So eventually, anyone who is serious about a career must spend his hours efficiently on high quality (aligned to the career path, while challenging, but not impossible) projects.

PS2: The freedom to spend one's time is absolutely important. Marriage and children could bring havoc to this freedom so people should think carefully before treading into the water.

>Marriage and children could bring havoc to this freedom so people should think carefully before treading into the water.

Way ahead of you, I moved to Europe as a precondition of my getting married. cries in TC

That perspective makes me wonder how much you were actually paying yourself per hour even if your net gains were in the tens of thousands?

Also distinction between learning (mostly) and production (mostly). In investing, business and no doubt poker there is nothing wrong with a period of losing money while learning. But you better be aware and be learning and you better not tolerate that period lasting indefinitely.

I hear this often about investing: people get started (losing money) with grossly insufficient education and they do learn for a few years, then give up, move on and blame it on "the professionals" or "science shows". When the fact is, if you start investing and learning at the same time, most likely you will underperform everyone else for a while. It's not because you were stupid; it's not because of "the professionals"; it's that you didn't know. It's an important distinction, and the equally losing opposite of "sunk costs".

This is why, for earning money, you should participate in positive sum games like the real economy. Poker is worse than 0 sum, its negative sum.

Perhaps in a casino taking a rake. But if you're playing w/ friends? The good times make it positive sum. Even in a casino, the players can be getting enough utility / enjoyment out of the game that it's positive sum.

Yes you are right but “pros” are playing with rake typically.

In a way you can consider poker 0 sum or positive sum depending on the utility you derive from the enjoyment of gambling. But that should also factor in the negative utility from gamblers that lose

the sum here is the sum of wins or losses across all players. for you to win, someone else has to lose. in an economy everyone can be a winner.

Care to elaborate on how the real economy is positive sum and poker is negative sum?

Poker has a rake and the amount of wealth in the system is the money people put on the table (not even factoring in that gambling winnings are taxed). Meaning the total wealth decreases for every hand played in a raked game. Economic transactions and increasing efficiency are positive sum. You can combine pieces of metal into new alloys and machinery which are more valuable than the sum of their parts. This is positive sum. If two people trade they only engage in trade if the transaction is mutually beneficial.

What do you think two poker players still in a hand raising each other are doing? They both still think it’s mutually beneficial. The maths if you have full visibility show it isn’t, but I’d argue that’s the same of the “real” economy too. In the latter example we can point to long-standing increasing income and wealth inequality as a proxy for the house rake at poker.

When two people are continually raising eachother in a poker game they are doing it because there is an probability of winning the pot. It remains zero sum.

edit: The economy being positive sum has nothing to do with the way wealth is distributed.

When is down to two, it's zero-sum.

Income inequality does not imply zero-sum.

If you think the economy is zero-sum how do you explain that there is plainly more wealth now than there was 200 years ago?

Is there? In real terms once adjusted for inflation? Or is it just distributed differently?

I don't quite follow this. Surely each poker player who raises thinks that they will take the pot and the other players will lose. So they don't each think that the raise is mutually beneficial. Player A thinks that the raise is beneficial for player A and detrimental for player B, and player B thinks that their call is beneficial to player B and detrimental to player A. Which seems like the definition of 0 sum.

Compare this to something like trading apples and oranges, where one person gets an orange (maybe they are tired of apples) and the other gets an apple (maybe they are tired of oranges). Both gets something they want in exchange for something they don't want.

A simpler way to put it is poker is a win/lose game, while markets are win/win.

Taxes are the rake in the economy.

And yet, the total wealth goes up over time.

That's only the case if you want to pave your own roads and dig your own well.

This "mutually beneficial" goes often unappreciated or un-noticed. But it's key. Yes, at the limit, nobody forces the poker players to keep playing - they both want to keep playing. Sure. But in economic exchanges, all parties can be growing together. And growing faster the more they work together. All while the economy as a whole is usually also growing. There are parasitic organizations and individuals attached and sucking blood: And the economy can still grow for all the other participants. Within reason on the blood sucking.

> Meaning the total wealth decreases for every hand played in a raked game. Economic transactions and increasing efficiency are positive sum.

I get the sense that you are dismissing the value of entertainment in this exchange.

Many of the donators in a given player pool know that they are losers and have a rough budget of what they are willing to lose. They engage in the exchange because they value the entertainment.

I personally see poker games as a transfer of wealth from worse players to better players, with the house taking a cut for creating the market. At higher stakes where most solid pros play, this rake is a small percentage of the wealth transfer.

Note that for many of the losing players, substitute activities for poker are gambling in the pit and/or sports betting. Are these also not part of the economy? What about movies, concerts, and TV? There is value in creating experiences instead of creating things, and poker is an experience that some people like.

To be fair, one of the things that poker is good at is letting people believe they are winners when they are not — this facilitation self-delusion sometimes makes for a bad look. That said, the bank account doesn’t lie, and I’ve seen plenty of avid poker players quit or drop stakes dramatically while choosing a different hobby or form of entertainment.

"Poker is a combination of luck and skill. People think mastering the skill is hard, but they're wrong. The trick to poker is mastering the luck. That's philosophy. Understanding luck is philosophy, and there are some people who aren't ever gonna fade it. That's what sets poker apart. And that's what keeps everyone coming back for more." -- Shut Up & Deal

>Poker is a combination of luck and skill

Luck follows (or at least positively correlates) with skill :) 30+ years ago in our company of friends in the university dormitories we had a guy who had the card deck handling skills of a major illusionist (and those skills were naturally a source of significant income for him). The guy was also tremendously lucky - well beside mere being alive and without broken bones while applying his skills for income :) - in particular once he won an amount enough to buy 1-bdrm apt in St.Petersburg back then on a scratch lottery ticket that he bought at a random place on our way while we were walking to some business meeting in a city that we just arrived that morning. If it were a skillful illusion, then it was way beyond anything i've heard or seen before :)

I'm not sure I follow... You feel that his skills as an illusionist somehow helped him win on that scratch lottery ticket?

I used to be the absolute BEST at scratch lottery tickets. OTOH, "every ticket a winner" used to be a thing, and I had free access to an MRI machine at the time.

Sometimes, you make your own luck...

I thought the people that administer the lottery keep track of the winners, and investigate any statistically anomalous winners.

You may have noticed that "every ticket a winner" scratch cards are no longer a thing.

> mastering the luck

I feel there are multiple notions of "luck" in common use and the ambiguous term leads to misunderstandings.

In my mind, the purest form of luck is, by definition, not something that can be mastered. It is 100% beyond one's control to influence. Examples might include: your genetics, flipping a fair coin, etc.

But lots of people talk about "luck" as though it's something that somehow one take advantage of in a willful way. They say "make your own luck." Or perhaps "put yourself in situations where you're more likely get lucky." Or maybe "master luck"?

That's all fine, and is a worthwhile topic, but I would call that "skill". Maximizing one's odds of something (even something involving luck) is a skill.

Perhaps by "mastering luck" they mean not allowing it to psych you out — even if you're on a long losing streak, even while doing everything right. But again, I'd say saying level-headed is a straightforward skill (difficult though it may be).

Anyway, that's my little rant on the ambiguity of the term "luck" (:

the quote GP is considering "mastering luck" as understanding emotionally that sometimes you will lose. the quote asserts that handling your emotions is more difficult than the skill of the game.

so i think there is a chance that the quoted person would agree with your comment here, as I think it is orthogonal to the quote

I regularly play in Vegas poker no limit hold’em tournaments, and am substantially positive. These are 12+ hour/day, multi day tournaments, and a bad player with luck just isn’t going to last the grind. 90% of the people in these tournaments have no reason being there. The top 10% are solid, and within that group, it does come down to luck.

I think that 90% of the people have no reason being there is the sweet point? But this is tournament so you have to be in the first X to win some return, right?

I'm not a professional player but I have observed in more than a trivial amount of occurences there are sharks in casinos picking the right cash table to maximize returns. They seem to know each other and don't play against each other, but always try to pick a table of fishes. I don't know if I'm thinking too much though.

Isn't that a legitimate part of learning professional poker? To measure how much you play against (now) known strong players?

I have played a mix of professionally, casually, and semi-professionally for the last ~20 years, in a broad mix of games and formats - while his points on volume are definitely true and not a new concept, the determination I've also come to over the years playing 10k+ tournaments and probably ~1k of those being live - you will never see the long run in the large multi-table format. I have seen horrific losing streaks, insane winning streaks, and soul crushing break even stretches of years with players that are much, much stronger than I am. Most of my big tournament cashes have come down to a few coin flips, any one of them losing would have resulted in a bust.

Smaller tournaments and cash games have much smaller variance and are what I would recommend for anyone trying to make a living for poker - large multi-table tournaments are moonshots and should be treated as such. His points about staking are valid in terms of "diversification" for a poker pro, but TBH, the staking scene is almost uniformly full of degenerates (on the stakee side) and predators (on the staker side). The fundamental problem is that the venn diagram of a winning/good player but also needs a piece of his action bought tends to be an inherently unreliable set of people.

The reason poker is a successful game is because bad players can win. Otherwise why would a person who was bad at the game stake any money at all. Personally I would rather take the luck out of it and attempt to normalize (perhaps by playing duplicate hands) but I imagine it would be quite boring for non poker nerds and therefore non lucrative for everyone.

> Personally I would rather take the luck out of it

Then you should play Chess, or some other perfect information game. There are popular games that don't involve luck.

I do and I play duplicate bridge, a game that has taken the luck out of a card game. I just like poker theory - I ran a bot for years - and I just don’t like variance that much and I guess I like the game for the strategy more than who has the most chips at the end, although obviously without the hazard it’s not anywhere as entertaining

Curious what do you mean by "I ran a bot"? Like, you programmed and/or operated a bot that played on real money sites?

I programmed and ran a bot that played on real money sites.

Oh, so you cheated people out of their money. That's not cool.

Not in the slightest. No different than a player playing optimally or with tight adherence to a strategy like Brunson's SuperSystem. Game Theory Optimal Poker is just the given when playing MTT - although many platforms have some form of Real Time Assistance detection.

Even in live games they use poker solvers in between breaks to optimise your playing potential and reduce the range of 'playable hands'.

Yes in the fullest. For one thing it's against the ToS of every site. But it's also just plainly unethical. Even the most elite players are merely reaching a moderately accurate approximation of optimal play, which completely pales in comparison to a bot that can find it on every hand. Of course a bot that simply assumes opponents are playing co-optimal strategies will only be minimally exploitative, but more sophisticated bots can easily incorporate historical data and find correct maximally exploitative deviations against opponents in real time, which again is something that even the best players are only able to do accurately a fraction of the time.

Also it's laughable to suggest that playing optimally is "just the given" in MTTs, which are arguably the softest format available where almost nobody in a given field is playing anywhere close to optimal. And even more laughable to suggest that modern bots are akin to players adhering to SuperSystem, a poker strategy book written nearly 50 years ago which was already extremely outdated before the advent of solvers 10 years ago.

Oh no! Not the ToS that hides inappropriately behind AML/KYC to stop you withdrawing cash, or arbitrarily lets a platform ban your account and seize funds with little recourse to any legal authority (as they're generally operating out of weird territories like Gibraltar/Isle of Man or Malta to circumvent other rules).

As for unethical, things like PioSolver, MonkerSolver, and PokerSnowie are basically de facto standard for play at high level online - and are absolutely used at breaktimes in live play. Then you have people multi-monitoring, or running GTOWizard in a VM, as a given.

You're basically claiming that all bots in action are Pluribus style, which is just nonsense. I bring up SuperSystem since its the earliest reference I can think of by a Pro to the concept of range advantage.

The modern poker sites basically just teach game theory optimal... which ends up with people running GTOWizard as a given. The best bots I've seen that avoid detection are basically doing some variant of the strategies outlined in modern guides like RIOs From the Ground Up.

It's a wild false equivalency to imply that using GTOw or Pio as a study tool is the same as using them for real time assistance.

And even if bots are imperfect, people and especially recreational players, don't sign up to real money poker sites to play against bots. Everyone knows intuitively they're at a massive disadvantage over a bot that can execute any strategy perfectly ad infinitum, even if the strategy itself is imperfect.

If you're going to be cheating scum, just own up to the fact that you're a bad guy; don't make intellectually dishonest justifications for it.

If you want to pretend you know what you're talking about, please at least reference Jonathan Tomayao at the WSOP this year. Person at the rail is four-time WSOP event winner and owner of the DTO Poker Trainer app Dominik Nitsche.

https://ftw.usatoday.com/2024/07/wsop-controversy-poker-solv...

Bryan Paris - "“Having this extra feedback between hands is helpful but a far cry from the automation of the game. Even with this feedback, Tamayo very much earned his victory,”

Tamako - "Joe and Dom actually helped. If they weren’t here, I likely do not win this tournament.”

As for the rest, I personally accept the imperfect world and play RTA-less - I'm not a naive child throwing slurs about because I can't accept the world has moved on.

{Example of an Upswing Couch and Pro who previously played online 6-max for a living, and his incredulity due to hilarious RTA in a live televised tournament) https://www.reddit.com/r/poker/comments/1ebi5aq/do_you_want_...

I know what I'm talking about - this thread was about someone who admitted to running a BOT online for real money. Like, fully automated no human in the loop. Which again, is just straight up cheating people out of their money. That's wildly different from what Tamayo was doing, which I don't consider cheating either, at least not by the current rules. Though I do think it would be fairer if tournament rules were changed to disallow coaching while the level clock is running but I digress.

Literally nobody respectable in the poker world argues that you should be able farm human opponents with bots, regardless of how close to optimal the bots are programmed to play. Except you, I guess.

> Personally I would rather take the luck out of it and attempt to normalize (perhaps by playing duplicate hands)

There's something called "match poker" which does exactly that.

The reason poker is a successful game, outside of the inherent fun, low barrier to entry, and high skill ceiling, is that you can leverage one or many different skills to achieve victory hand to hand.

This includes 'soft skills' like body-language reads, speech-play, false-representation, baiting players into non-optimal play, as well as the underlying mathematical basis.

The luck element - known elsewhere as RNG Jesus - is mitigated completely over 10,000 hands by appropriately skilled players. There's a reason the composition of the final tables of the WSOP can be so static year on year, multiple bracelet winners wouldn't be a thing otherwise .

A fully optimised 'safe' player can be beaten both short-term and long-term live by a player who is skilled in reading tells, or simply bluffing. The BBV may be different, but the concept of a 'hero fold' exists for a reason - and is often more satisfying than a 'hero call' to veteran players.

I’m an expert poker player.

What I said was 100% correct and didn’t need a bunch of extra unrelated stuff.

I’m making a fundamental point about randomness and poker which you are failing to understand. Stop and try to understand for a second instead of launching into mansplaining.

And I'm a golden retriever. My tail wags when I've a good hand.

Please take your reductive misandry elsewhere. It's impressing no one.

So you’ve heard of mansplaining before, I’m guessing quite a few times.

Here is a suggestion. Read the comment the other person states and then engage with it instead of attempting to use it as a jumping off point for your post.

And btw, luck does not disappear over 10k hands. The final table at the wsop has not been static.

Since 2000 when hold’em poker became popular nobody has repeated back to back wins. If it was a game of skill we would expect the best player to keep winning.

Of course. Anyone with Direct Reports in IT gets training on how to handle narcissists and self-appointed experts when they devolve into bigotry to derail conversations.

As for your contention regarding the modern era, I simply answer 'Phil Hellmuth' with his 154 WSOP cashes 64 WSOP final tables. Negreanu, Ferguson and Seidel all have 40+ WSOP final tables. Hellmuth also has 17 bracelets to Ivey's 11.

But zero back to back winners since 2000.

1. This has many parallels with the concept of Resulting - our tendency to equate the quality of a decision with the quality of its outcome, which was conceptualised in the book Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke, which although a great work, I have to admit I did not finish.

2. Even though the element of chance is inherent to Bridge too, Duplicate Bridge is a clever attempt to nullify the role of luck in tournaments. The same hand is played in different tables (by different teams), and points are scored depending on how you fared in comparison to the other table. So, rather than playing to win, you play to do better than your counterpart in the other table. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duplicate_bridge

For things which have some combination of luck and skill, there tends to be a baseline skill for, average results given no/low skill. So in a thousand person event, you'll have some number of people performing at baseline and a smaller collection that have actually shown up with some skill. Depending on how high the skill floor is and how much variance there is, this often means people performing at baseline don't have any real chance of winning.

But! The variance still matters a lot for the skillful players: their chance of winning is 1/10 instead of 1/1000, and for the baseline folks the chance of winning is basically zero.

I know you were probably putting those numbers in as placeholders to illustrate the concept, but worth pointing out the advantage that (even a lot of) skill gives is nowhere close to 100x over weaker players.

> but worth pointing out the advantage that (even a lot of) skill gives is nowhere close to 100x over weaker players.

Not op, but I think you’re right… it’s probably 1000x or infinity depending on how you look at it.

The ev of the median player in a typical tournament is negative, while the pro is positive. As a measure of skill, that metric can’t really be expressed as a multiple.

As for skill level, I think a prob being 100x a rec is probably about right — most people have no idea how much better pros are than they are.

That said, poker sustains interest from recs precisely because the format leans more towards the luck side of the luck-skill continuum than complete information games like chess or go.

So a rec can play head up against a top pro like Phil Ivey and can still win, but that victory would be a function of luck rather than skill. Iterate that spot 100x or 1000x, and the rec doesn’t win very often.

> So a rec can play head up against a top pro like Phil Ivey and can still win, but that victory would be a function of luck rather than skill. Iterate that spot 100x or 1000x, and the rec doesn’t win very often.

The variance in poker is extremely high, allowing long-term losing players to often have winning sessions in cash games, and to (often enough) cash and even win tournaments.

After the entry ticket is purchased (ie, not subtracting it's cost in your EV calculation), the long-term losing rec still has positive expectation in a tournament. So does the pro. EV_pro <<< 100 * EV_rec. This will be true even if the pro is Phil Ivey. Any professional poker player would much, much rather take, say, 50% of the combined winnings of 100 random recs in the WSOP main event than 50% of Ivey, assuming both were offered at the same price.

> After the entry ticket is purchased (ie, not subtracting its cost in your EV calculation), the long-term losing rec still has positive expectation in a tournament. So does the pro. EV_pro <<< 100 * EV_rec.

ROI is a standard metric for measuring MTT success. Pros are typically positive, recs are typically negative.

Flipping the metric to EV after buy in strikes me as a straw man, but I will roll with it…

I am fairly certain that I would take action on the results of a basket of 100 mtt pros being 100x greater than the results of a basket of 100 mtt recs in the wsop ME. Like I said, I’m pretty sure that would be closer to 1000x, since the vast majority of the recs will not cash, while the pros are much more likely to cash and run deep. I think this is a decent proxy for roi. If you’re interested, I will be happy to negotiate terms and have a mutually agreed upon escrow-holder for a bet next year.

I agree with your comment that there is a lot of variance in poker, but that variance can be mitigated quite a bit via skill except in “short stack” MTTs that devolve into shovefests relatively early.

> ROI is a standard metric for measuring MTT success. Pros are typically positive, recs are typically negative. > Flipping the metric to EV after buy in strikes me as a straw man, but I will roll with it…

That, as you said, makes it trivially true that the pros are infinitely better than the recs. By that metric it doesn't even make sense to have the conversation. The original comment I responded to was: "their chance of winning is 1/10 instead of 1/1000". My thought experiment, far from being a straw man, simply extends that idea from "winning" to "amount made in cashes."

> I am fairly certain that I would take action on the results of a basket of 100 mtt pros being 100x greater than the results of a basket of 100 mtt recs in the wsop ME.

Very unlikely. To give a sense, based on payout structure this year if even a single rec makes the final table (at least one did) that alone puts the number to beat at a minimum of 100M (9th place prize = 1M)... and first is 10M.

> but that variance can be mitigated quite a bit via skill except in “short stack” MTTs that devolve into shovefests relatively early.

No, even deep stack tourneys are still really, really short compared with anything like a "long run" sample. Jonathan Little, the pro who own https://pokercoaching.com/ and has millions in tournament earnings, once went 50 tournaments without even cashing, let alone winning. Daniel Negreanu, arguably one of the best tournament players of all time, recently had a 2 million dollar losing year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nu-QqzikpWU.

> I will be happy to negotiate terms and have a mutually agreed upon escrow-holder for a bet next year.

I will absolutely take that bet, but you'd need to define some way to select what counts as the pool of pros and the pool of recs. Alternatively -- this wouldn't be a bet but a way to test the theory -- look at the list of everyone who cashed this year and cross reference it with Hendon Mob db or something similar... and define a pro as someone who's had lifetime winners of 300K+ or something. You'd need to control for the number of pros among the entrants as well, but if you're right you'd see the pros represented at 100x their entry proportion in their cashes proportion (that's very rough and doesn't account for size of cash, but it should be an easy enough experiment to do if you want to see that I am correct).

Wasn't if Phil who said something to the effect of, "If it wasn't for luck, I'd win every hand!" Which seems pretty much the thesis of this writing (though without the arrogance); ultimately resolving in, process as a better indicator of skill than results, and the best deduction of process in luck skewed results is consistency over time which essentially requires more data to deduce.

For what it's worth, people have studied what appears to be subject to a lot of random chance to me, a non expert - fantasy sports, and found skill plays a significant role and this study references poker studies if you have more interest.

https://epubs.siam.org/doi/abs/10.1137/16M1102094

decent post.

i used to play tournaments 12-14 hours a day back in the glory days. most important things for me as a MTT (multi table tournament) grinder were discipline, game selection, bankroll management, good note taking, study, volume.

these days i chuckle at how some people are selling 70% of their MTT action at 1.3 markup - thus freerolling. a nice variance killer if you can get away with it / justify it.

grinding life > grinding poker, imo.

> Once you have identified an activity as being more luck than skill driven, a person’s process for the activity starts to become a much stronger signal for whether or not they are actually any good.

This is the central point of the article, and I don't think it's true. If it were as easy as "following a good process", then anyone could get rich investing.

This is a point worth clarifying. I think a lot of people actually do get rich investing. It just turns out the "good process" in this case is leaving your money in a diversified portfolio for decades. This leverages making a bunch of bets that on average have a positive expected value over a long enough time horizon that you are able to realize the gains.

There are also certainly other ways to have an edge in investing (quant firms come to mind), but I think the most realistic option for "anyone" is readily available in the form of low fee index funds and a long time horizon.

> I think a lot of people actually do get rich investing.

https://youtu.be/H5jPJQ5cVGU?si=KoXd4H3FOkLZ1y06 has an interesting counter-point. You need to fuel your returns with savings.

I guess it's a subtlety — in the end, since you said "for decades", and if you adjusted your wording sightly (such as "help you reach your financial goals", instead of "get rich"), the underlying message is similar. But I figured I'd share the link in case you find it interesting.

Yeah, agreed, love the Plain Bagel and the generally sane takes from that channel.

"Get rich" is definitely too broad of a target and probably has too many connotations with "mansion and luxury cars" when, as you identified, what I meant with that statement is closer to "financial goals" or, more tangibly, something like "comfortable retirement".

The article demonstrated that skill / correct process is not sufficient for success. However, for making estimates of future results, looking at the process to gain insights into the EV rather than looking at past results can be more fruitful. Just looking at past results often results in falling victim to reversion to the mean.

online is getting pretty dicey these days sadly

Are there specific instances or issues? I am curious if you mean cheating, collusion, fraud, etc...

> you mean cheating, collusion, fraud

Yes, all of those things.

There are teams at the same table all working together by communicating with each other about what hands they have. The sucker at the table is the one not part of that team.

Also, it’s software, which means it can be written to favor the house.

Online gambling for real money is the equivalent of just setting your money on fire.

"Online gambling for real money is the equivalent of just setting your money on fire."

Citation/Any evidence would be great, but I won't hold my breath.

"Any gambling for real money is the equivalent of just setting your money on fire". (c) by Jajko, 23/07/2024

It doesn't require advanced studies to realize this, just learn from mistakes of others. Even if 1 in 1000 wins (for now), its a losing game for any honest folks. Scammers prey on simple and powerful addiction and little else, games can be easily rigged in ways you will never realize just as parent describes.

My friend is an honest poker pro who's been making a living from playing online since 2008 or so. He may be "1 in 1000", but that's because online game is tough, not because it's rigged.

This is an important topic to me, and I'm glad to see one of the "winners" state plainly how much luck is involved in poker, and by analogy, many other areas of life.

I'd love to see articles like this written by someone who did not win, too. It's too bad that people pay less attention to those stories, as he mentioned in the article (c.f. clickbaity title). At least this is a winner admitting the importance of luck, rather than just saying "do what I did, and you can win too!" [1]

I'm surprised there was no mention of modern machine learning "solvers" for poker, which can get very close to perfect play. The game is not truly solved in the game-theoretic sense, but so close as to make very little difference, as I understand it. Some professional players do strange things like look at the second hand of their watch, as a source of randomness as input to their decision making, since ideal play requires some true randomness in your actions.[2]

So, in addition to the "results-based vs. process-based" angles presented in the article, I'd say there's also a "mathematics-based" consideration. At least for poker, where all the rules are perfectly clear. Harder to apply that to real-life poker-esque situations like founding startups, of course.

[1] As always, relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1827/

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/18/magazine/ai-technology-po... — NYT "How A.I. Conquered Poker" (alt link: https://archive.is/QbXXE)

> admitting the importance of luck

Poker is a mathematical game with mathematically fixed odds. Real life is different in that there is a considerable amount of room to tilt the odds in one's favor.

For an obvious way to tilt odds in your favor, stay in school and learn what you're being taught.

What courses / subjects would you recommend?

> ... stay in school and learn what you're being taught.

Agreed with you there (:

And generally, doing what you (ethically) can to give yourself a leg up is great. But I find that approach/attitude can get dicey when it is then used to cast judgement on other people (I'm not saying you were, just going on a tangent here). Acknowledging the sometimes-overwhelming effects of luck on a person's life, despite their best efforts, has helped me be more empathetic, I think.

If someone is down-and-out, maybe they were lazy or wasted their opportunities, but maybe they didn't, and they just got waylaid by misfortune. Keeping that in mind helps me hold back from shouting at them to "pull yourself up by your bootstraps!" or such. That may be helpful in the former case, but can be hurtful in the latter.

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