Skill versus Luck curve

[mojito]

hey everyone,

i am curious to know how much skill versus luck does holdem consist of, depending on the limit, table characteristics...
I read somewhere that in the very very long term (playing for 30+ years at 8hours/day and around 30hands/hour, 95% of all possible combinations of hands/flops/positions would occur to one player. So i guess the best it can get for skill is 95%.

What is an approximate number for a practical game ??

thanks,

[jasonHoldEm]

I'm not sure if I'm understanding your question exactly, but over the long run there is no such thing as luck only the sum of the expected value of the bets you have made. (See Theory of Poker for more info).

As far as hold'em goes...from pg 7 of HPFAP

"The answer is easy. By playing hold'em, the expert player can with the most money with only a reasonable amount of risk."

S&M go on to explain that hold'em is attractive because weak players often make the mistake of thinking any two cards can win and in addition hold'em offers opportunities for the expert players to extract additional money from their opponents.

They conclude by stating, "There is no question that once you have achieved expert status, hold'em offers an excellent relationship between the expectation and the standard deviation. The reasons for this are that the best hand holds up more often in hold'em than in any other game, and that you have the advantage of being able to see your opponent's last card which is yours as well. This means that sometimes you can throw away a hand that you would have to call with in other forms of poker, or you might be able to get in an extra bet, whereas in other games you might be forced to check."

Personally, I'm still working on that whole expert status thing... /images/graemlins/crazy.gif

Peace,
Jason

[Bozeman]

Ratio of skill to luck scales as one over the square root of time played.

For a good (1BB/hr) player, one hour is about 90% luck, and 100 hours is about 50% luck.

On the other hand, one could say that since the maximum possible win rate is ~3 BB/hr (assuming ~40 hands/hr), the crossover to 50% occurs at around 11 hours.

It all depends on how you define luck and skill.

Craig