Thread: luck vs skill
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Old 04-12-2004, 06:06 PM
Izverg04 Izverg04 is offline
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Default Re: luck vs skill

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My poker career is going into year #2, as I have become more serious about my play, friends and family have been critical, becase they feel its all about luck. I personally think its 90% skill and 10% luck, but I would like the opinion of some seasoned veterans

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The question of the impact of skill in a game of chance is non-trivial, and it is often addressed by game theorists.

First of all, the question needs you are asking needs to be well defined. If the answer you are looking is dependent on your time frame, as in: luck is important in the short run and skil is important in the long run, you simply seek a comment on the fact the standard deviation/win rate goes down in time as the square root of the time scale (number of hands played).

To me, the time-frame-dependent answer is not very satisfying. How do you then compare, for example, the luck/skill factor in different games, say poker and backgammon if your answer depends on the number of games played?

One possible definition of the element of skill in a game of chance is as follows (you could read this reference for some discussion). Take 3 players: 1) a rank beginner; 2) world class expert; 3) hypothetical world class expert who knows all the "chance" information in the game. In poker Player 3 would know all other players' holdings and all cards to come, in backgammon he would know the sequence of all rolls to come, in roulette he would know the sequence of all numbers to come, so on.

Match up the expert (2) with beginner (1) and estimate the winrate. Match up the cheater (3) with the expert (2) and estimate the winrate. The ratio of the two is the skill/luck factor. In roulette it would be 0, in chess it would be 1. In poker, I suspect it would be about 20%.
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