an "expert's" comments on online poker

[MicroBob]

my dad doesn't even know how to play poker and only took a couple of statistics course in college and even HE can figure this stuff out (as far as i can tell)
his comments on the article (having read it in my blog):



[ QUOTE ]
While I didn't totally understand his rationale it
is probable that his analysis applies to the whole population of internet
poker players and fails to take into account that some are much better
than the population. There was a similar analysis of investors in the
stock market which concluded that it was impossible to beat the market.
But obviously there are many investors who have beaten the market over
a significant number of years. I had several credits of statistics in
college and grad school and one of the frequent problems that was
encountered was that the population of whatever is not normally
distributed which is a requirement to apply probability analysis.
Thus if there are a small percentage of outliers in a given
population--such as excellent poker players or investors--then it
becomes difficult if not impossible to apply probability theory.


[/ QUOTE ]


I think his observation that similar arguments have been made about the stock-market not being beatable is kind of interesting.