Good Poker Players Aren't Lucky
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I played a lot in college, but never really got "good" per se. We had a group of about 20 or so of us who played semi-regularly. There were two players who were both far superior to everyone else, but they didn't always win. Just like everyone else, they naturally suffered the turmoil of a bad beat here and there. But aggregate their winnings over the course of the two years we all played together, they came out far ahead of everyone else.
And I think that's probably the main point here. These two knew how to grind out the bad beats and come out on top over a long enough time frame.
I also have a good friend who crabs in Alaska (his dad and him are on the Deadliest catch together) - each season is a "gamble" with how long it will take to catch enough crab to meet quota, but it's not like they're putting money into a slot machine and hoping for the best. There's a system that leads to success. Sometimes they get "lucky" and their season ends quick, others it's more of a lengthened grind.
They seem awfully similar.
Oh, and don't get me started on naked futures/forward positions...
[0] http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/equity-index/us-index/e-mini...
With a futures position you may end up losing more than you put in (your initial margin) but assuming you went long a stock without using margin, the most you could lose would be your initial investment.
But perhaps it's not a fair comparison. I would say that buying 100K of stocks on margin is similar in risk to having a futures contract with a similar value, all other things equal.
Also, with forwards (not exchange traded) there would be counterparty risk if no clearing house was involved.
(Also you can get higher margins much more easier with futures than with stocks and high margin of course means more volatility (=risk) )
Yes, I agree (but then again, you could just replicate the index in your stock portfolio...)
> owning 100k in stocks would also get you dividends that futures won't.
Sure, and that's why the futures will generally appreciate faster than the stocks will - it makes up for the fact that you don't get dividends. Similarly, the fact that you only need to use a small part of your capital to hold futures means that you can earn interest on the rest, which provides a pull in the opposite direction, slowing down the rate of appreciation.
With futures contracts and derivatives you can potentially lose infinity dollars.
>Oh, and don't get me started on naked futures/forward positions...
Some of the people that purchase these are plenty happy during a crash. What is it about time-based derivatives that you have a problem with in particular?
The key word is "naked"
And I don't have a problem with futures/forwards at all. I have a problem with people arguing there is less risk with naked futures/forwards (especially commodities/currencies) than there is playing poker; therefore poker, IMO, should be no less legal.
There are other places, like you noted, where people can gather, put money into a zero-sum game, and it's completely legal.
There are also lots of nuances in many of these state laws, where poker actually is legal under the right circumstances (like no house rake). I guess the fees associated trading options aren't considered a rake, so that's cool with the government.
Edit: Will downvoters explain their reasoning? Btw, someone else said something about how poker is a game of luck at low skill level and game of chance at high skill level but that's not really how it works. Poker is a game of skill if you're playing against bad players because the game is consistently beatable with sufficient skills. The better and more sound your opponents become, not just relative to you but on an absolute basis, the more important the role of luck becomes.
In a poker game, any player can choose to get better, so much so you get to a a point where both players are playing game theory optimal. At that point, there is NO edge.
PS- support the PPA if you can!
Roulette is a particularly bad example as there is no decision (well, there's one decision on American Roulette tables that is worse than every other) that changes your expectation on the amount wagered.
Nontheless, the law (and thus the article) is about the former distinction.
I mean, you'd never sit down with friends and play roulette or blackjack or any casino game just for fun, right? It's be incredibly boring because you have zero choices and without the thrill of money being on the line there is no reason to play them. I wouldn't even put them in the 'game' category. You may as well flip a coin over and over. Even card counting BlackJack is just game of not getting kicked out by the casino -- counting cards itself is simply memorizing a table and has no choices either.
I've always been mystified people can spend hours in a casino playing the least interesting games I could imagine.
Poker is the lone exception. Poker with friends for trivial stakes still good. I can think of plenty of games with similar variance so beginners would always do reasonably well against experts and they'd still be be a million times more interesting than everything else in the casino.
You'd think with all the money in the gambling industry that some effort would be put towards making the games themselves intrinsically better.
Could you open up a 'casino' anywhere that instead used games that were obviously skill based because it woudn't be considered gambling? Poker is one of the most popular casino games and it's also the only game of skill Why not more?
tldr: Why are Casino games so bad?
But regardless of the luck factors, I think the real distinction is that in poker, each player is competing against the others. But in blackjack, roulette, etc, each player is competing against the house.
Skill based games on the other hand are generally player vs player, where the house doesn't win or lose any money, like poker. The casino doesn't want to get involved with betting against the players in these types of games because to win consistently they would need to staff skilled people to play the games and pay them enough that playing the other side of the table is less lucrative. That's likely to be quite expensive. So instead casinos make money off of skill based games through the second less lucrative stream, incidentals, providing guests with food, drink, lodging, and entertainment. These are more expensive and aren't as reliable as just churning through people in non-skilled games.
tldr: Why are they so 'bad'? Because luck based games make the best money.
Variable rewards are also the reason why poker is one of the few games with a heavy skill component that can move large amounts of money directly between players; few people are willing to be a sucker. So losing players have to either get something else from the experience, or be convinced that they aren't losing players.
I said elsewhere in this thread that skill-based vs. luck based is a continuum. The most popular poker games tend to land on the sweet spot where "enough luck that bad players can think they're good" and "enough skill that you can actually be good" meet.
Wouldn't these games be even more appealing if had the same reward mechanisms but were also intrinsically interesting?
>The most popular poker games tend to land on the sweet spot where "enough luck that bad players can think they're good" and "enough skill that you can actually be good" meet.
You'd think you'd see games along this continuum but poker is alone in the sweet spot. The other casino games aren't even worth considering.
Some games still involve more luck than skill--blackjack, for instance.
Other games involve more skill than luck, and poker certainly falls into that category.
Poker is a game of skill with an element of luck. It is not a game of chance.
It depends on the level of the players. For beginners and casual players with less strategy, the game is much more about luck.
But their lob was a skill--one they don't control very well, but a skill nevertheless.
Betting in poker is the same thing, and is the only thing the player controls.
The way the cards come out is always chance, and the level of skill can't influence it.
No, the cards you "expect" will not come out "more often" after millions of hands. They will come out exactly as often as they're supposed to.
Whether or not a card will come out when you place your wager is still a matter of chance. You can't skill it into happening.
Skilled players are undoubtedly taking the likelihood into consideration when they place their bets, of course.
I think that would be a fair point to make
The idea that some players' skill is so low that their ability is indistinguishable from pure luck does not diminish the idea that basketball is very much a skill-based game.
Isn't inducing the player with the best hand to fold before showdown the same as a hand decided without a show of cards? Or do they mean that 85.2% of hands were decided without seeing the flop? Both don't sound right.
Later their flush (or whatever) came in, but they weren't in the hand any longer.
Two players showed down, but they were the player who won the pot and some third guy.
85.2% of hands were decided without players showing their own cards, certainly many of those hands had flops.
Dan Harrington made the final table in 1987 (152 entrants), won the final table in 1995 (273 entrants), and made back-to-back final tables in 2003-2004 (839 and 2576 entrants). Or in a lesser example, Johnny Chan won back-to-back in 87-88 (152 and 167 entrants).
The Cavs winning the #1 pick three times in the last five years, however. That is rigged.
This stifles innovation in real-money games. No company will risk spending any money on the design/development of a new real-money game when there is a tangible chance of going to jail and losing everything. This frustrates me a lot, because I enjoy real-money games (poker included), and I'd love to play new kinds of real-money games, but these freedoms don't exist.
It is worth noting that the other 14.8% of hands, where a showdown is reached, are typically the ones where (much) larger amounts of money are exchanged.
So, betting decisions might decide the outcome of a majority of hands, but it's unlikely this corresponds to a majority of the money flow.
It is true that most of the money changes in hands where you get farther in the hand because pots grow geometrically as you continue on in the hand.
However, the importance of decisions becomes more important as well, and most of the edge a skilled player will have over a weaker player comes about from those larger pots based on decisions made later in the hand.
I play heads-up hyper-turbos, as well as other games, on PokerStars. I've been studying poker, reviewing my play, and grinding for years. I'm a mediocre reg and I can grind out consistent profits. Here's my graph of 18,106 $15 heads-up hyper-turbos on PokerStars.
http://i.imgur.com/AQ26oVQ.png
It really, truly, is not that hard to make money at poker if you're willing to invest even a small amount of time doing quality study and review.
According to back of an envelope calculation, if there was no skill in poker, and you were just coin flipping, approximately 1 player for every 28 would come out with similar results.
This is a statistically significant result, I suppose, but not very. There are presumably many thousands of players who can present similar results, whether or not they have any skill. The jury's still out over whether you can continue this streak and claim +EV in the long term.
You should have some serious concern about this, since you are subject to self-selection bias in posting these results.
All-in-all, your results don't yet convince me that poker is a skill game, or at least not (yet) that you are skilled. Get back to me after the next 18,000 games, if you feel like it.
I confess to some dubious assumptions but I tend to believe that those assumptions averaged in your favour. This perhaps illustrates why poker is so good at hooking people.
http://i.imgur.com/1uC5y0U.png
Note that I'm also only a mediocre regular in these games. There are MANY people who have far better results than I do. They average a 3-5% ROI which is much higher than mine.
Also note that the reason my graph dipped after the first 10k games or so was because I went from playing the $15s-$30s to playing the $100s/$200s for awhile. Due to the increased skill level I dropped back down. Here's another image showing my stats for each buy-in level.
http://i.imgur.com/D0lHx3H.png
If you still doubt how confident you can be in this sample, you might want to read the following article on confidence intervals on husng.com:
http://www.husng.com/content/given-my-results-what-should-my...
My 50k+ game sample means that there is a far lower than 0.1% chance that my results are due to the good end of variance.
And here's a graph of ALL my poker tournaments. This includes 9-handed multi-table tournaments, 6-handed SNGs, heads-up shootouts, everything.
http://i.imgur.com/6jyCXn0.png
Poker is 100% a game of skill but it really depends on how you approach it. Professional players or serious amateurs such as myself make money at the game simply because people approach it as if it's bingo.
If every recreational player was putting in time studying poker theory and reviewing their play, it would become much, much harder to make money playing. As such, I really don't mind if people want to continue thinking it's a luck based thing. It just means more profit for me since that perspective, oddly enough, doesn't stop people from dropping $$$ in the game, it merely stops them from thinking they can gain an edge by putting in time and effort. Recreational players wouldn't play if there wasn't a certain amount of luck...
EDIT: Also, it's important to note that every poker player has to pay for their education. Look at my last graph. I was an unprofitable player for the first 10-20 thousand games or so. That was when I was just playing micro/low stakes on PokerStars recreationally. Once I gained some knowledge, and decided to take it much more seriously, my profits skyrocketed.
It's far better to learn how to play poker at micro/low stakes online, where you will pay less for your poker education, than it is to start with mid/high stakes online or in your local casino. Either way, you'll be a losing player to start. Choose the more inexpensive option.
You're saying that 5,000 games is enough to determine your overall winrate, and yet every 5,000 games of yours has been different: from game 31,000 to 50,000 (a recent 19,000 game streak), you are down.
Either this should mean you are a losing player, or it means 20,000 games is not even nearly enough to draw a conclusion. Be careful about having it both ways to suit you: that is confirmation bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias.
Let's say, I wish you the best of luck, and leave it at that.
Good luck :)
On top of that, you seem to be suggesting that the variance in my ROI is somehow attributed to an inherent "luck" factor of poker while ignoring the fact that the sample size ranges from micro stakes up to high stakes poker. My winrate is obviously going to vary between stakes because poker is a game of skill and the higher the limit, the more skilled the player pool.
FYI, it's also quite annoying to throw wikipedia pages explaining common psychological biases at me when you've already stated that you are basing most of your conclusions on "assumptions" since you aren't well acquainted with the subject matter. I'm well aware of everything you're warning me about but you also seem biased against poker. I've shown you a sample of over 50,000 tournaments. That's over 1.5 MILLION hands of poker. It blows my mind that you seem to be keen on ignoring empirical evidence and mathematical analysis here, but if you want to ignore that, so be it.
But, yes, indeed, good luck to you as well.
Rake is a part of every form of real money poker. It's how casinos and online poker sites make their $$$'s.
So, I would guess that more than 1 in 28 players would show these results, having experienced a random "win quickly" phase that has yet to dissipate.
(This might not apply if parent is talking only about 2 player tournaments, but applies to poker generally)
Heads Up specifically means that there are match-ups between 2 players. This doesn't mean it's necessarily a 2 player tournament, e.g.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Heads-Up_Poker_Champi...
I already checked this case and you are right, indeed.
I've seen friends and family throw away thousands of dollars because of their addiction to poker. I'm not sure that poker is a net gain for society or not, but to say that poker is simply a game of skill that is no more harmful or beneficial than basketball or bowling or fishing or chess is disingenuous.
I admit that poker and other forms of gambling are not equally addictive or destructive to all people, just like WoW isn't equally addictive/destructive to all people who play. However, there are far more cases of gambling, specifically games of luck/skill like poker/blackjack, that result in broken lives and broken families due to a gambling addiction than in a traditional "game of skill".
Perhaps society as a whole is willing to believe the positives of poker outweighs the negatives, like it does with drinking alcohol or I guess now maybe smoking marajuana in some states.
We just shouldn't pretend that poker is all positives because it is statistically a game of skill. There is a lot more to the behavior around the game than that and only a fool would believe otherwise.
One difference, of course, is that most of the people ruining themselves betting on other sports are spectators not participants.
Your principle point - that "game of skill" doesn't mean "useful" or "productive" or "worthwhile" - certainly very much stands.
Just like life: the harder you work, the luckier you get.
It does appear that serious poker players do better in the long run as they not only consider pot-odds when playing but also management of their bankroll to ensure long-term survival. Is there an element of chance? Of course, but it's not the only factor - few things are black and white.
But if someone choose to go all-in blind pre-flop then they are choosing to play the game as pure gambling and their version of the game would be pure chance.
But again, it's all about the circumstances. Poker is often compared to day trading in the markets and though it's not a perfect comparison, there are some analogies. For examples, options can and often are used in complex strategies to either reduce risk or enhance returns. But that doesn't mean they can't be used to speculate wildly - in these situations, the potential payoff profile begins to look something like a straight up bet.
This isn't making the game pure chance; it's just cutting off that player from future decisions. The opponents still get to call or fold, which means the opponent is manipulating the odds that the all-in player will win a contested pot.
This is a tautology; the real question is whether there is significant discretion in making those decisions. The 85% statistic is meaningless without knowing how many of the winners within that segment simply folded weak hands and kept strong ones, in which case it would be clear that luck is the dominant factor. The 7% where the poorer hand won might merely represent the occasional exception to the rule.
I'm asking this because I once met a guy that was making a living playing online and it made me think. Would a computer program do better than a human in that context? It seems not to be the case, otherwise everybody would be using a program to replace them and humans player couldn't make profit anymore.
Online poker lacks the physical 'tells' that occur in a live game, like making an obvious fake reaction to some event. But, there are also some online 'tells' such as reaction speed.
I used to play a lot of online poker.
In Fixed Limit, the bet size and pot size are all controlled and can be pre-determined, leaving fewer permutations to solve. It's easy to calculate that if a bet is a constant, then you can profitably call with holdings from XY and "higher" in a given situation, but it obviously gets harder when the bet size can vary greatly.
To answer OP, Fixed Limit is considered solved (or close to it? Haven't been following the news on this) from a mathematical and game theory perspective, and so AIs have been built to play game theory optimally. NLHE is still far, far from being solved, but there are bots that have been created to churn out small, albeit automatic, wages short-stacking (to mitigate bet-size variability) smaller stakes games where its tendencies aren't as openly exploited.
Poker is very much a mathematical game. And physical tells, reaction-time tells online are pretty insignificant in the longrun.
Source: Was a 'top pro' for many years online
I'm not up to date on the general consensus on the state of 2 player no limit, but personally I'd bet on the best bots over the best humans even at 100 blind stacks.
http://www.computerpokercompetition.org/ has some results from previous competitions. You can probably find some of the relevant papers on the subject from there as well.
Gambling involves the creation of risk to speculate on for no other reason than the thrill of speculation. Participants in financial markets (at least in theory) take positions in risk that already exists. In other words, they assume existing risk for others.
There are on occasions patterns in Roulette, especially with certain dealers. In addition, there is a little trick casinos sometimes employ. They loosen the legs on the table to the point it wobbles slightly. The dealer will then lean against the table and watch as the ball is about to drop. They can then pop the ball out of an undesired slot by a well placed shove of the hip. Just something to watch out for if you are gambler.
I firmly believe just like in computing, the entire concept of "random" depends mostly on ones frame of reference.
Your claim "they wouldn't do this because they already have an edge" is just silly. Why wouldn't they take a chance to make more money? Especially since, as you say, "proof" is a bit hard. An accidental bump. That's all. No intentional cheating here.
I would like to re-iterate my main point. This is something to watch for if you are a roulette player. If the table wobbles when you push against it... walk away.
Things have changed a bit since then and I don't play anymore. If you start winning more than you should you become known. I will tell you that. And this changes things.
For example, one technique I used was taking advantage of dealers who had skill placing the ball...yes, these do exist. At one Nevada casino in a smaller town I stayed for a few days and played very small amounts of money while watching the dealers. One Asian lady was very adept at placing the ball on the green zeros when she wanted to. So I went to her table and played $40 which I lost. Then I left and watched her while playing small amounts at the craps table. I saw her practice placing the ball on the green zeros 4 times in a row (not sure why she would have done this in public). I walked back to her table and placed some reasonable bets all over the board. As soon as she released the ball I put maximum bets on the green zeros. What do you know? I must have got lucky! I then collected my winnings and checked out. That bet more than paid for my trip.
Roulette is not always as random as it is held up to be. No, I can't "prove it".
A session win/loss log would be sufficient.
The house edge in roulette is huge. Anyone claiming to be a winner at roulette in the long term is either lying or delusional.
An equivalent claim would be someone claiming to double their money in the stock market every year for years on end.
"Anyone claiming to be a winner at roulette in the long term is either lying or delusional." Possibly but you don't know this. Besides he doesn't claim "over the long term" and states WHY he quit playing.
"The house edge in roulette is huge." Yes. IF the game is random. Read the post above.
To make an assertion that a game of roulette in a licensed casino is not random is in the realm of moon landing conspiracy.
PS: I also think it's rather sad and transparent that you created a new shill account to reply to me.
You simply don't have my experience. Sorry.
Observation is observation and it makes one a bit of an expert.
Was it "confirmation bias" and "delusion" when I saw a practicing dealer place the ball on the green zero 4 times in a row? Was it "imagination" when I took advantage of that and won a bunch of money? I have a lot of stories like this.
You weren't there. You don't know. You don't have to believe me. If you want to take the time... go observe for yourself.
Absolutely. That is a classic case of observational or confirmation bias, with a sample size of one, it shows absolutely nothing. At odds of 36-1 there will be, randomly, one time in 36 when you make an incorrect hypothesis about the way a roulette ball is going to land, and yet by chance it happens the way you 'predicted'. To confirm your hypothesis with any degree of certainty, one would need to have multiple situations of this kind happen repeatedly. You aren't doing that.
So... a one in 36 chance. Actually, I'll give you one in 18 as there are two sets of green zeros... 0 and 00.
So what is the chance of this happening 4 times in a row?
1/18 cubed = .000000952 chance of occurring. Probably not confirmation bias. Probably not something one is likely to EVER encounter. (Never mind that I encountered similar many times). If you read the post, I watched her practice doing this. No one was playing at the moment. Then she did it again and I burned her for a lot of money. Read my posts if you care. Or, believe whatever you wish. Roulette is not always random. And if you spent the time I have you would know this.
Little snipes are easy. But I can tell you both are the case and I am neither lying nor delusional. And,
I'll go ahead and reply to your snipe at the very bottom of the thread as well. Don't mistake the word "observation" for the word "playing". I assure you my observations were fairly objective. And this is why I was able to win at roulette over a period of time. And I became known. This happens.
Feel free to regard it as delusion or whatever and snipe away. It would be nice if you believed me but hey... it doesn't matter. The table bump scam happens. You would be wise to admit that maybe it does if you play roulette and watch for it. If you don't... I guess believe however.
1) You have to know the wheel and sectors by heart. If you don't, you can't determine patterns when they arise.
2) Don't sit down. You are never going to play for more than a couple of spins. If you don't win, move on. If you do win don't push it. Don't let the eye in the sky observe a repeatable pattern from you. Salt your real bets with some decoy bets.
3) Don't gamble. If you can't determine a probable pattern, don't play. You don't play most of the time.
4) Watch for sectors that seem to follow other sectors. With enough observation you will begin to learn these. When the dealer picks up the ball and throws it a rhythm often develops. The point from which they pick the ball up is the last number. If they remove the ball from the wheel between throws... that isn't a table to play unless you are confident they are good at "aiming" (which is rare). These "follow sectors" are often consistent between dealers, casinos and tables when the pattern forms. As and example, 32 often comes after number 23 if a certain pattern is being formed. If you find that pattern... you have found a dealer in a rut. Time to lay down a bet or two based on other "follows" you know to be in the pattern.
5) Don't drink. You are working. But appearing to drink is cool. Appearing a bit tipsy even better.
6) Don't sit and stare at the table while observing. Walk casually by and glance at the number board. Look curiously as if you are trying to figure out how the game works. If there are some penny or nickle slots with a good view of the action you are in luck. Take a seat and slowly spend some pennies while observing.
But my real advice? Don't waste your time. It's hard, Casinos are wiser now and opportunities less. If you do figure it out and push it they __will__ know who you are and you won't push it long before they take steps. When you go to the next casino surprise.... they will know who you are as well! Don't expect a sleepy dealer.
For whatever it is worth.
That strikes me as even less likely. Given that dealers are tipped from winning players, they wouldn't want to cheat in the house's favor unless they're also pocketing the extra winnings. This is the equivalent of overcharging customers and then skimming from the register, except the store's surveillance is better than most.
FWIW, the one instance I have first-hand knowledge of someone being ratted out, it was the casino's owner. She asked a surveillance employee to destroy a tape and he sent it to the state Gaming Commission instead.
Besides, he clearly states he isn't attempting to "prove" anything but only relating an account.
Case in point:
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/wynns-abnormal-lucky-streak...
I think we all know how a game with a statistical edge to the house has 9 straight quarters of larger-than-expected wins for the casino.
On slot machines the house will pull tricks. For example, they will have payouts more likely at certain times than others. There are others as well. But in total, the machines must statistically pay out a certain percentage and this is checked by third parties.
Roulette? I don't know how they would ever insure this. It's a good place to take advantage if the house is inclined to do so.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/tech/what-do-terrorism-and-on...
I do believe they would be very good at doing on-the-spot calculations in their head, they're often just not very trained in math.
Anyhow, surprisingly little in poker is math-dependent, particularly in normal ten-handed games. The cognitive load is mostly about factoring in thousands of variables, past hands, and potential hand combinations of your opponents.
Of course feel players are doing EV analysis, but that's 99% about estimating hand ranges properly. The math is certainly the most simplistic part of the analysis.
Could you outline the process or point to a place to read up on it WRT poker?
There used to be prominent winning players who were unaware of the math behind the game, but the theory nowadays is they mostly just lucked into naturally playing in a style that happened to be better than the field during the period of time they played (i.e., years ago back when the game was less sophisticated).
Nowadays, those players are often the weak players who the players more skilled at theory can comfortably beat.
There's an eerie parallel to the early stock traders here.
That said, luck is the primary influence of outcome given a small enough time frame.
It's also possible to have your mistakes "fixed" by luck. Moneymaker was not better than Farha, I'll give you that.
Why are real rounders not winning?
A book like Kill Everyone [1] puts forth a pretty reasonable tournament strategy where you try and accumulate a lot of chips early on and then start making risky moves in later rounds based your cards, position, and relative chip count.
Tournaments are played this way because the blinds and antes increase faster than the average chip stack increases. Once you get to the point where you have to make risky moves, you open up the luck angle a lot. The skill comes from knowing the probabilities and making plays with positive expected value over the long run, even if it means eliminating yourself from the tournament due to chance. But in the short-run, a relatively unskilled player could make similar decisions, get lucky and win the risky plays, and do very well.