Is there more luck involved in tournies or cash games?

[octop]

I was discussing this with my friend today and he was laughing when I said cash games required more skill.
In touriens,even big ones there are so many preflop all ins you have to get very lucky to win. And online, with the blinds escalationg so fast there is a great deal of luck involved on almost every hand.
Granted it takes skill to be a tourny winner long term but I still think more luck is involved
Thoughts?

[mudbuddha]

IMO
The two are different games and require skills in different areas. In cash games, there is no changing of the blinds, and simply, solid poker will prevail.
I feel that tournaments, it is always a dynamic scenario, where inflection points and understanding the field is more important and there are times that you will gamble more than in cash games.
With proper overall strategy it is possible to gain a substantial edge because ability to switch gears is much more important.

[Guernica4000]

Being that everyone agrees that luck is much more a factor in the short term and skill in the long term. I would have to agree that playing cash game with the same blinds would require more solid poker and skill to win.
With increasing blinds in a tourney and being that it only takes one hand to get knock out, I think luck plays a bigger role.

By the way I still think the more skillful players will prevail in both.

[fimbulwinter]

[ QUOTE ]
I was discussing this with my friend today and he was laughing when I said cash games required more skill.
In touriens,even big ones there are so many preflop all ins you have to get very lucky to win. And online, with the blinds escalationg so fast there is a great deal of luck involved on almost every hand.
Granted it takes skill to be a tourny winner long term but I still think more luck is involved
Thoughts?

[/ QUOTE ]

this is a no-brainer. deeper stacks mean better players win more.

Overlay(cashgame)>Overlay(tournament)


fim

[Xhad]

Short term, both cash games and tourney results are dominated by luck. Long term, both cash games and tourney results are dominated by skill. Asking which is more skill-based isn't a very well-defined question IMO.

[TomCollins]

Uh.... tournaments are a lot more luck, I have no clue what you mean you can't compare the difference.

[NYCNative]

I guess it depends on your definition of "luck" here.

In a tournament situation, getting "lucky" in the sense that the best hand played well doesn't withstand a bad beat, can be the difference between not making money, making money or making more money. Whereas if you lose even your entire stack in a cash game with the same hand you can buy back in and win it all back and more and if you win a hand you shouldn't have, you can lose it back even more quickly.

But then you get into situations of coin flips. In tournaments you sometimes are quite happy to get all of your money in as a 53% favorite or even a 47% underdog because that can very well be optimal considering your stack, the blinds, the payouts and other factors. You don't win a tournament without doing well in races and losing only one can devastate you - even though a nearly 50/50 shot is, by nature, not a case where the loser was statistically "unlucky."

There's no need to put your stack in jeopardy against a coin flip in a cash game because a good player should be able to lay that down because he knows that he will be able to eventually have his stack as a 70-80% or better favorite if he just plays his game.

Then you can play your hand perfectly and still be a loser as often happens when AA and KK lock up. This can happen in a cash game or a tournament equally.

In summary, I'd say both tournaments and cash games are skill over the long run and have more luck in the short term, but the effects of variance are significantly more catastrophic (or euphoric the other way) in tournaments than in cash games.

[Xhad]

Maybe it has to do with the fact that I've played a lot of games besides poker and what that has to do when I think of "luck based" versus "skill based".

In game design terms, a pure luck-based game is one in which any contestant is as likely to win as any other. A pure skill-based game is one in which a player demonstrating some ability tested by the game will always defeat someone without this ability, or with the ability to a lesser degree.

This model applies somewhat to poker tournaments, because these tournaments have clear winners. Cash games, on the other hand, are not "games" in the classical sense that they are not competitions with a clear winner or loser. You just play for awhile, and end up with either less money or more money than you started. This means that we must view cash game poker in the sense of "the long run", the problem being that while this definitely allows us to say qualitatively that the game is skill-based, it doesn't allow us to measure how skill-based it is by any metric that I can see, which means that we can't compare it to tournments in terms of skill-based vs. luck-based except in that we can say that both are skill based to some degree, and both are also luck-based to some degree.

So, I am not saying the statement "Tournaments are more luck-based than cash games." is incorrect, I am saying that it is meaningless.

If I'm wrong, can you present the statement "Tournaments are more luck-based" in such a way that is falsifiable (meaning we can debate it logically)? Or define luck-based/skill-based in a way that allows us to make a comparison between cash games and tournaments? I don't know how to do either of these or that there is a way to do it, which is why I think it's a bad question.

[kschellenger]

Here's the problem with the comparison: You are likely comparing a SNG (60-100 hands, maybe less) to a session at a ring game.
As pointed out, luck is the overriding factor in success rates in the short term. If you play 10 hands at a cash game and win 50BB, that is not an indication of your level of skill but an indication that you got one, or more than one, really good hands.
That being said, to win any individual SNG probably requires more luck than winning 5BB over 100 hands in a ring game. But long run it would seem sustaining a winning rate in tournaments is a product of playing hands at the most opportune times and therefore more skillful.
But, you won't have a sustained winning rate in either without skill and you won't have a short run win streak without luck.

[Ghazban]

[ QUOTE ]
There's no need to put your stack in jeopardy against a coin flip in a cash game because a good player should be able to lay that down because he knows that he will be able to eventually have his stack as a 70-80% or better favorite if he just plays his game.

[/ QUOTE ]

This is flat out wrong. +EV is +EV. If you won't take a coin flip (with correct pot odds if you're on the 47% side), you're playing suboptimally. Assuming you are properly bankrolled, the only possible justification for avoiding a close play EV-wise in a cash game is if you are in a capped buyin no-limit game, there are several poor players with deep stacks who are likely to leave soon, and a big loss will prevent you from getting the maximum from the other poor players in the near future.

I can't believe how many times I read things like "waiting for a better spot" misapplied to cash games on these forums.