Is there really any luck in poker?
My brother Howard Lederer and I have recently had some really interesting discussions about the luck factor in poker. Now, we all know that there is skill in poker, but the general consensus has been that there is a preponderance of skill, not that poker is a game that is all skill. Arguments for this have centered on the fact that good players, in the long run, will come out winners, but in the short run anyone can win. So the argument has been that poker is a game with a significant luck factor in the short run but over the long run the law of large numbers will play out and the better players will win.
But is this really true? Is there really any luck in the short run at all? Howard has come up with a very compelling argument that the answer to that question is no.
Let’s say we program a machine so that it knows the rules of Texas Hold’em. It knows that you are dealt two cards. It knows that a flop, a turn, and a river comprise the community cards. It knows that you can check, bet, call, or raise on any given street. It knows the rules and mechanics of the game. But let’s also say that we program the machine to play with no skill at all. This means that the machine will randomly choose at any given decision point whether to check, bet, call, or raise. Now, remember, on any given street there are up to five possible decisions (a bet and four raises) and our machine will behave randomly, with no skill, at any of those decision points. How would the machine do? Terribly, obviously.
If you put our machine into a short event like a sit-n-go, against eight skilled players, it would lose every time. The skilled players would quickly come up with the most effective strategy against the machine, which would be to raise the minimum against the machine every time. This would always put the decision back on the machine for the lowest risk; one third of the time the machine will fold, one third of the time it will call, and one third of the time it will raise. And the machine will do this regardless of its hand. It will be as likely to fold aces-full as it will be to fold ninehigh. It will be as likely to call with top pair as it will be to call with five-high. You can see pretty quickly that our unskilled machine would never win, even in the short run.
Howard’s argument shows that poker players tend to drastically overestimate the luck factor in poker, mainly because, in general, we are playing against very skilled players and whenever we close the skill gap between opponents in a skill game, it appears that there is more luck involved. We can take baseball as an example. No one argues that baseball is not a game of skill. And the same thing happens in baseball when we narrow the skill gap that happens in poker. If we take the Yankees and pit them against a little league team so that the skill gap is very large, then the Yankees will win every time. But if we take the Yankees and pit them against an equally skilled major league team, say the Red Sox, now luck appears to play a much larger role. But it is actually that factors like injuries and the weather become a more important part in determining the outcome of the game. While the better team will win over a series of games, the outcome of a single game will appear to be determined by luck, but is really due to factors outside of the control of the teams.
And poker is no different. Good poker players will overestimate the luck factor in poker because they forget exactly how skilled their opponents are. The fact is that most players are very skilled at hand selection and betting theory, even in the smallest games, compared to a totally unskilled player like our machine. As in baseball, the more skilled your opponents are, the more it appears that luck determines the outcome in the short run. To take the baseball analogy further, if we stick the very best professional poker player in the world in a $.50/$1 NL game, that player will crush the game just as the Yankees will crush the little league team. If we pit that same player against the other top pros, the best player will win in the long run, although the short run outcome may be determined largely by factors outside the players’ control.
The interesting thing is that if we took our same unskilled machine and programmed it to know the rules of the lottery, it would perform the same as a human being. This is because there is no skill to the lottery. Once you know to purchase the ticket, fill out the appropriate number of circles on the number slip, and give it back to the attendant to prepare your ticket, you are good to go. Once you know the rules, there is nothing more to the game. And yet lotteries are excluded in the current gaming legislation and poker is at risk. Seems illogical to me.
Poker is a game of skill. It is a game in which the outcome is as determined by skill as much as baseball is. Once we understand this, it is clear that poker should be set aside from gaming legislation that deals with games of chance since it is clearly not a game of chance. It is just a matter of getting people to truly and deeply understand the difference between games of skill and games of luck.
