

Is poker a game of chance or skill? - quilby
http://www.math.tau.ac.il/~nogaa/PDFS/skill4.pdf

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tptacek
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.

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

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Natsu
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).

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rubinelli
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.

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mistermann
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.

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Apreche
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.

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tansey
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?

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aquateen
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.

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tansey
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.

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aquateen
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.

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tansey
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.

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aquateen
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.

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tansey
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.

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wake_up_sticky
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?

