It really is just a game

[QTip]

I posted this in the Small Stakes Forum; however, it probably should have been posted here. We're having fun with it, so I thought I'd send it to a broader audience:

I don’t know if anyone will even care to read this or not, but it’s something that I just thought was interesting to me. This is so simple, really, but I’ve not been thinking this way. So…take the time to read it or not.

I’m not sure what I thought Poker was all this time I’ve been playing it, but I’ve not been thinking about it correctly. It’s just a game. It’s a game like Tiddlywinks, Stratego, Spades, Monopoly, Chutes and Ladders….whatever, it’s just a game.

I had a dream last night that made me think about this. I was playing Monopoly for money. What if I said “I play Monopoly for a living”? That would seem weird, but I’m sure somewhere out there, people are playing Monopoly for money.

When I woke up, I thought about this, and it did make some sense. Mason talks about in his Poker Essays, how LH is a game where there is an interesting balance of luck and skill in limit holdem. This makes is so that there’s enough luck involved in the game so that a novice can win often enough by getting lucky in order to keep him coming back even though he’ll lose more in the long run. Yet there’s enough skill involved in the game so that an informed player can consistently win enough to have the upper hand. He also talks about the fact that NL holdem is a game where the skill is shifted more in the direction of the informed player.

I guess I’ve always just thought about poker as not just a game since it’s generally played with real money, and that sets it apart in my mind. However, any game could be the same way if there were huge #s of people willing to play the particular game for money. For example, tiddlywinks could be played with gold coins. Everyone puts the same number of gold coins out there. If you make one in the bowl, you keep it.

This got me thinking about other games, and where there are in relation to the skill/luck balance and where poker (specifically LH) falls in that balance. If we think about a line that would represent an edge that an informed player could have over a novice, there could be 2 extremes. One side would represent no edge to the informed player where there is no edge possible, luck dominates the game and skill is almost non-existent. The other side would represent a gigantic edge where the novice has almost no chance of winning, skill dominates the game and luck is almost non-existent.

Perhaps a game where luck would dominate would be a simple dice game. You roll 3 dice, sum the dice values and keep score. Each player alternately takes a turn until the first player to reach 100 points wins. You would roll a dice to determine who goes first. There’s no edge here unless one player doesn’t know how to add. Luck dominates this game.

Perhaps a game where skill dominates is chess. I know a bit about chess and have won some tournaments in the past. However, if I were to play a world champion 1000 times. I’m probably going to lose all 1000 of those games. The informed player (expert) has a gigantic edge. Obviously, the world champion would like to play this game for money as often as possible.

So, perhaps a graph could be illustrated in this way. These spots aren’t set in stone, but just for visual purposes.



The greater the leveled of “being informed” or developing the skill(s) involved in becoming an expert, the greater the edge, or advantaged the player has in that game. So, each game could be represented in such a fashion to show the amount of edge a player could have over another, and also how much space is involved for someone to have intermediate skills. For example:



The only way I could be a chess champion is if he would decrease his edge available by worsening his play. This could happen from being distracted, over-confidence, underestimating my ability, being drunk or drugged, being upset whatever. In these cases, his edge slides to the left on that line and his edge decrease and therefore my chance of beating him increases.

This helps me look at the game in proper perspective. Imagine someone making the following posts in a monopoly forum:

“They always land on Free Parking! What can I do?”

“I have my hotels set up, but they keep landing on the utilities instead of my property! What can I do?”

“I keep going to jail! What can I do?”

“They get all the good chance cards! What can I do?”

What can I do? Nothing is the answer. That’s the luck side of the game. Now, would it make sense to get upset about that in the game of monopoly and start mortgaging all your hotels and making stupid trades? Of course not! Monopoly tilt! Yet, we do that very thing in holdem when we get upset and starting playing loosing starters or going to far when we’re beaten. People are going to suck out! That’s the luck side of the game.

Perhaps if I were to take the analogy a bit further with Monopoly. It would be like this:

Imagine a version of Monopoly that goes like this. Each time you play, you randomly distribute the properties to the players (some people do this anyway to make the game go faster). Then, you look at your properties and decide if you want to play or not. Some people make play no matter what properties they have – loose Monopoly players. Some would wait until they had a couple Monopolies already, and then decide to play – tight Monopoly players. Of course, with some Monopolies already in hand, you have a better chance to win. However, how you play the game after you get started is going to have a large impact on whether or not you win – postflop Monopoly. This is the meat of the game. Making trades, deciding what and when to build, etc. However, there will be times when you start with 4 monopolies (including Park Place and Boardwalk), but your opponent just gets lucky rolls and so forth, and you lose anyway – Monopoly suckouts. They level of your opponents will also determine how likely you are to win. If they start with any cards, that’s great. If they make stupid decisions in the game like making any trade you offer, never building houses, etc., you’re going to have an edge. The worse they are compared to the better you are, the greater chance you have of winning.

Understanding this luck/skill ratio is helping me think about our game in the right perspective.

So…whatever that was worth. It was good for me to think about the GAME this way, so I thought I would share it with whomever else might care to read this.

[astroglide]

only skimmed it, but if you put stratego that low (with monopoly higher) i've already wasted my time

[QTip]

lol! You may be right!

[brick]

Cool article. You should refine and submit to the 2+2 internet magazine.

[QTip]

You're the 2nd person to say that. I didn't even know a person could do that. Perhaps I will. That would be cool.

[iluzion]

I thought I read somewhere that LHE takes more skill than NLHE?

[QTip]

Mason has said things like that, and that's a correction we talked about in the Small Stakes Forum. It's interesting to me that LH can be a more complicated game; however, NLH offers the greater edge to the skilled player. I guess this is because of the size of the errors that are offered to the poorer players...the errors have more impact.

[jkkkk]

post flop monopoly lol

nice article. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[MoreWineII]

I'm too dumb to understand all that so I'll just say "boobs" ...cuz you just can't argue with some big ol' bouncy jugs.

[QTip]

You should get in touch with Chris Daddy Cool and his selection of avatars.