Looking for an appropriate challenge to those who say poker's all luck

you really want to give money to democrats ?
yuck
[img]/images/graemlins/crazy.gif[/img]

That letter from the Ohio AG is almost verbatim the one from the Massachusetts AG. I agree that the law needs a major revamp. The problem I see here is that they've lumped poker in with games of chance such as Bingo and lottery. The law here actually says nothing about poker but limits/restricts lotteries and that's the law the AG here is throwing poker in with. Here's the deffinition of skill.

Skill: Proficiency, facility, or dexterity that is acquired or developed through training or experience.

According to the dictionary anything a person does can be considered skill. However the AG is narrowing the meaning down and painting with a broad brush that narrow deffinition. The difference between a game of chance and poker comes down to a couple of key differences.

1. In poker the odds are in no players favor before the cards are delt. In black jack, roulette, craps, bingo, keano, or any other game the odds are in the favor of the house and the player before he even puts his money down is at a distinct disadvantage and remains that way (except for specific bets in craps and card counters in black jack. the later only after he's played a few hands to get his count, he's already played as a dog though)

2. In depth knowledge of the game, odds, and opponents creates a distinct advantage for the perosn with these skills. This is similar to a person playing any sport. Take Tiger Woods in golf. Tiger has played countless rounds, spent countless hours at the range, and has the skills to be the best. He is better than any other player out there because he is more prepared and trained better than any other player. Being born with talent doesn't hurt but talent only gets you so far, skill is something you learn through practice and study.

3. While chance does play a factor in a poker hand, chance plays a part in everything, chance does not negate the ability of the card player. The player still has the ability to reason and apply their skills through out the game. In a game of chance there is no ability to modify a game plan or use a skill set. The only time this is the case in poker is in a no-limit game and the player goes all in pre-flop. Otherwise reads, odds determination, bluffs, etc. can be made and refined.

It is these 3 points (possibly some other but this is what I've come up with so far) that makes Poker different form all forms of games of chance. It is the reason that a player can be a long term winner. Because to be a long term winner you must have the skills to play well. Without those skills you WILL be a loser. To this point William Baxter Jr took the US Internal Revenue Service to court regarding his poker winnings. Under US tax law unearned income (dividends, interest, lottery winnings) is taxed at a much higher rate than earned income. The US Federal court ruled that his winnings were earned income. Now if poker was a game of chance how is it that his income is considered earned? To collect dividends from a comany stock or intrest from a savings account one needs some knowledge of the investments. But once that investment is made there is no more skill involved that would allow someone to earn more or loose less in these types of earnings (i know there's more to investing in stocks and such but i'm not trying to write a treatise here). Poker on the other hand allows for a player with sufficient skills to do both.

Okay so now that I've ranted to a paragraph or three, what do you do about laws like these. Well, playing a game to show case skill vs. chance is not the way to go. As someone else mentioned already politicians will not go for it (no politician wants to be made to look like a fool). The only way to go about it is to create a bill and get enough support for it that it passes through the legislation. Writing a bill sounds difficult but it's not really. Getting the support is what's difficult. But it is the only way to get it changed. I am working with a friend of mine (he's a lwayer, that helps a lot) on creating a bill for MA. We're crafting it so that it allows charity torunaments. We were going to go whole hog and make Poker legal, card rooms and all, but decided small steps first. If it passes then a couple of years down the road once the average citizen has gotten used to the idea of legal poker then we go the rest of the way.

My $1.50 on the subject.

[maybedinero]

>I'm in an office full of statisticians so maybe I'm biased<, but:
Why not look at this from a different angle. We have on this site online poker players with massive PokerTracker databases of thousands and thousands of hands of online Texas Hold 'Em (and to a lesser degree Omaha).
Perhaps it is possible to use the data in these databases to statistically show that play within certain parameters (VP$IP, PFR, PFA) is +EV compared to play outside those parameters?