Reponse from author of Poker Craze article

[Cubswin]

ding dind ding... that was my thought process as well [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

[Scotty O]

I read the same article. In the games sited, bridge, cribbage, rummy, ect. I feel these are games that you need cards to win. If you don't get the cards, you will loose since the game goes to "showdown" on EVERY hand. What game can you win by out playing the player and never needing cards to win? Its poker because not every hand has to get to show down.

In the long run, a skillful poker player will make money, which implies to me, chance does not outweigh skill.

Scotty O

[Lazymeatball]

IMO, The 3% figure is refferring to the advantage that comes from drawing optimally in draw poker, ie. not breaking up a pair to draw to an inside straight and stuff like that, and he is neglecting all advantages that come from skill in betting which are a much bigger factor in the game as far as 2+2 is concerned. He is comparing this 'optimal play' to that found in hearts or cribbage.

Do you people seriously think he is evaluating earn rates of proffessional poker players? Do you think he even knows what the term BB/hr means?

[LinusKS]

I hadn't thought about it like that, but I think you're right.

If you look at it in terms of money won/money bet, the figure might not be that far off.

If you're involved in 20% of hands (voluntarily or not), and the average pot is $30, (say in a 2/4 game, for example) and your contribution is average one-third of the pot, in one hundred hands you'll have wagered $200. If your profits are 2BB, that's $8/200, or 4%.

[ QUOTE ]
74% of all numbers cited in 2+2 posts are made up.

I will speculate that 3% is supposed to be a strong player's profit divided by the total amount of money he wagers. That's the normal way the house edge is specified in most gambling games.

This statistic is a lot less useful for poker than for roulette or slots because there is no direct connection between money wagered and EV. Nevertheless, for a given expert and set of game conditions you could measure this statistic and come up with a result that would converge after a large number of hands.

Pool the results of many experts and many games and 3% could be a consensus result analogous to the famous 1 BB/hr. Essentially a rule of thumb for what a draw poker expert can hope to accomplish.

Having said all that I have no idea if 3% is a plausible number or not. Sounds like a big edge to me.

[/ QUOTE ]

[mosta]

won-over-invested sounds right to me. I doodled around a bit with that number a few weeks ago, but forgot what I came up with. But here's another potentially relevant statistic--look at percentage of winning sessions in PT. I think that tends to be around 55%, maybe a little under, for a winning player. How that would relate, I need to think about more.