Poker Skill or Luck: Real Data

Posted on March 23, 2008 
Filed Under General

spade6The Poker Shrink wants to remind you that his position of skill versus luck in poker is that there is no luck in poker. None! There is variance that arises from the random distribution of cards in a standard poker deck but what some call luck is only a statistical anomaly that will disappear with successive trials.

That being said; there has been way too much argument, particularly in front of legislatures and courts on the question of: Poker, game of skill or game of luck. Why debate something that can be empirically verified? I mean you wouldn't debate whether a "heart pill" would cure you or kill you. You would expect testing and so would the governmental agencies involved. So why not simply run the tests?

Well, a group at Case Western University has done just that. The test was quite simple: they took some students with little knowledge of how to play poker and gave half of them a brief history of poker and the other half some basic strategy guidelines (like what are good starting hands in Hold'em). Surprise, surprise; the group with the strategy tips did better than the uninstructed group. Furthermore, the groups each improved as they played more hands and self-deduced better playing strategies. Even in the short term timespan of these trials: some skill won out over simply the "luck" of the draw.

Read the full article here.

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