As any player worth a pair of deuces will tell you, poker is a game of skill. As Lancey Howard, the unstoppable master in the classic film The Cincinnati Kid, states after beating the Kid’s complete house with a combination of hands with odds, it’s all about “making the wrong move at the right moment.” The chances are estimated to be in excess of 20 million to one.
Millions of newcomers are drawn to online poker clubs, which generated an estimated £2.8 billion in total wins worldwide in 2013.
There has never been any question in my mind that chance plays a part. The aforementioned greenhorns would not be around for long if it didn’t It would also be ridiculous to deny that at least to some extent talent is involved – otherwise why would some contestants consistently win more than others?
Ability vs. chance
The primary issue is whether one feature is more important than the other. The rationale is simple: poker is a game of chance if chance surpasses talent; poker is a game of ability if skill outweighs chance. This is what Rogier Potter van Loon of Erasmus University Rotterdam and Martijn van den Assem of VU University Amsterdam set out to discover in a research just published in PLOS One.
Using a database of 456 million player-hand observations from a year’s worth of online games, we first looked at how consistent player performance was. There was a lot of evidence demonstrating the role of talent in winning games as a result of this.
For example, players who were in the top 10% of performers in the first half of the year were more than twice as likely than others to keep doing well in the second half of the year. Players who finished in the top 1% in the first half of the year were 12 times more likely than others to replicate the feat in the second half. Users who suffered from the start, on the other hand, continued to lose and seldom progressed to the top.
The important thing is that the outcomes can be anticipated. In a random game there would be no correlation between players’ winnings over time, but in a game of skill there would be. As a consequence, we know that poker isn’t just a game of chance.
This is a pivotal point.
The basic issue of whether talent or chance triumphs, however, remains unsolved. We looked into it by comparing the results of good and incompetent players in simulations. We found the turning threshold after 1,471 hands: experienced players may expect to beat less gifted peers at least three-quarters of the time.
In other words, poker becomes a skill game after around 1,500 hands. To put this in perspective, most online players are likely to play 1,500 hands in 19-25 hours, or even less if they play multiple tables at once. Of course, devoted gamers all across the globe may feel forced to celebrate. They may rest easy knowing that the game they enjoy necessitates and rewards true skill, and that in the end, ability and cunning usually prevail over chance.
Consequences for the legislation
The real problem, though, is about more than simply approbation and bragging rights. You may be asking why academics waste their time formulating equations based on Texas Hold ‘Em’s intricacy. What is the rationale for this? The legal implications of determining whether poker is a game of skill or a game of chance are potentially important.
Questions over poker’s claim to be a skill game have influenced law for years. Players in the United Kingdom no longer have to pay tax on their winnings, which is a huge plus for everyone from the tiniest online tyro to Victoria Coren Mitchell, a writer and TV personality with a net worth of £1.5 million.
What are considered games of chance in certain countries are subject to significantly harsher regulation: internet poker, for example, has been illegal in most US states since the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act was passed in 2006.
If policymakers pay heed to the opposite results, all of this might change Even without them, the American legal system has dealt with this issue many times, and verdicts have been affirmed, reversed, and affirmed again. There is a lot of money on the line, as one would expect, and we can expect the debate to continue as more evidence becomes available.
However, there is little question that the majority of the poker game is based on ability and strategy. If you don’t want to practice, believe yourself fortunate, and want to win large, roulette or slot machines are the way to go. According to the latest reports, New Zealand online pokies feature high RTP games with good chances to profit.
