Poker is Gambling

[steamboatin]

I don't believe I have had my head right about poker since day one. I play low limts, mostly B&M but online also and I have always bought into "Poker is a Game of Skill" and have tried to hone my skills and improve my game.

The downside of this is, Bad Beats and downswings can have a very significant impact. If you believe that Poker is a game of skill, then Bad Beats are a personal attck on your skill and your game. If Poker is a game of skill, then how can you have a downswing if you continue to play well? I think this is why downswings bother me so much, I work so hard on my game and try to improve my skills and someone that is clueless, gets lucky and stacks my chips.

But if POKER IS GAMBLING, then all we are doing with our skills and knowledge is to manipulate the odds and only bet when the odds are in our favor.

Downswings are not an attack on our skills but a normal part of gambling. Bad Beats are merely someone who was willing to bet when the odds were against him and just got lucky.

I have been going through a little downswing and today, at the B&M, the deck hit me over the head for about an hour and then it turned against me for about an hour and a half. Now, I played good poker and if poker was a game of skill, the people I played against would not have had a chance and over the long term they don't. In the short term, I beat them like a drum for an hour and they out drew me for the last hour and a half. This confirms my belief that poker is gambling. (I ended up +4 big bets for about 3 hours but that is not important)

Most of my frustration can be directly linked to believing that Poker is primarily a game of skill. I beginning to understand that chance plays a much larger role in Poker than I had previously believed. That somehow, if you were skilled enough, the element of chance could be eliminated or nullified.

This is completely wrong thinking on my part. Poker is chance and chance is poker. That is why you need a bankroll sufficent for the game you play, no matter how good you are, sometimes, you just don't win.

So if Poker is a game of skill and you lose to completely clueless fish, then there is something wrong with your game and it would be normal to be upset. But if Poker is gambling, and the clueless decide to gamble against the odds, then Good Luck, Fishies, you might hit today but you are in for it all next week!

Poker is Gambling and I am cetain that understanding this basic concept will do wonderful things for my attitude and my game.

If you think I am an idiot, flame away or jump right in and set me straight, I have an open mind and I am willing to listen and learn.

[miajag81]

You're not an idiot...of course poker is gambling. The mistake most make is to believe that it is impossible to win in the long run at any kind of gambling.

[d10]

My earnings improved a lot when I began to think like this. I imagine that I'm betting on the roll of a dice. If I roll a 1, I'll pay my friend $1, and if I roll any other number, my friend will pay me $1. Of course my friend is an idiot so he agrees to this. If he wins a few times in a row, and sometimes he will, am I upset? Hell no, I'm just happy that I have a friend stupid enough to make bets like this against me. Now if my friend gets incredibly lucky and I roll a 1 7 or 8 times in a row, the joy of knowing I'm a big favorite is reduced by the realization that my friend is in fact beating me. In the end, I'm just after his money, and I'm not getting it, despite the fact that I should be, and that can be troubling. But what can I do about it? Should I offer to pay him for rolling a 2-6 and take the 1 for myself? That would be completely irrational. Although in poker it's easy to start doing this, because you can rarely estimate your odds with exact certainty, and it's easy to rationalize a bad hand into a good one by ignoring the factors that make your hand so bad. An example of this would be calling with an OESD because you know that it has a reasonable chance of being the best hand at showdown, but you're ignoring the fact that the pot is small. If you're on tilt and actually consider calling a bet without the proper odds, just imagine your opponent laughing at you for being that idiot who would bet even money on 1 number on a die, that will make it easy to fold. Of course, thinking in this manner isn't a sure way to prevent yourself from going on tilt, here are a few things that I've noticed still screw up my game quite a bit:

Playing above my bankroll - If the payout on the roll of a dice was $1000 instead of $1, and my idiot friend beat the odds a few times in a row, I would be down more than I can afford to lose. In poker, because of the slow pace of the game, and the structure where you typically get more than 1-1 odds from the pot but are less than a 1-1 favorite to win, you can go on losing streaks that span months. If you lose a big pot and you find that you're looking at the pot as real cash that should have been yours, and not just another good bet turned bad, you might be playing above your bankroll.

Getting beat by a hand that had the odds to call - It's often correct for more than 1 player to stay in a pot. Say you're playing a 10/20 game and you're dealt AA in the big blind, there are 3 limpers + the SB and you raise it to get $100 in the pot. You flop a set but one of your opponents flops a flush draw. The small blind bets with nothing, and you raise to $20. All fold except for the flush draw, who certainly had the odds to call. You're certainly in a good situation. You will win the pot more often than he will. But you'd prefer your opponent to fold instead of putting more in the pot, because he's only paying you $20 more to see each card which gives him a reasonable chance of taking the entire $100+ pot away from you. In a limit game, circumstances arise where you are literally helpless when it comes to hand protection. And when your opponent correctly calls and draws out on you, it can be frustrating. You can't blame yourself, as long as you charged him as much as possible to make his draw, but you can't blame him either, so who can you blame? That helplessness can be hard to deal with if it results in opponents drawing out on you more than the odds say they should. (Note - I prefer limit games to NL games for other reasons, so don't think I'm trying to incite a limit vs NL debate here, I'm not)

And the most dangerous aspect of this way of thinking, when you discover that you made a play that turned out to be extremely -EV when you thought it was +EV - Face the facts, you don't always play theoretically perfectly, nobody does. By thinking that you will always be the one betting on 2-6 and never be that idiot betting on just the 1, you set yourself up for times when it turns out that you did in fact take the worst of it. If you pride yourself on the EV of the bets you're making and not the results themselves, this can crush your psychological state. I once folded unimproved AA on the flop when a very passive woman sprung to life on a raggedy board with a hand that she didn't raise with preflop, nor reraise with after I raised. I pegged her as having a set but also possibly 2 pr, the pot was small and I made what I thought was a good laydown. It turns out she just has a strange way of playing QQ, which she won with unimproved. That was a catastrophic mistake and really screwed with my head, simply because of the pride I have in always making the highest EV play.

This might have got long and slightly off topic, but it helps me sometimes to put my thoughts down into words. Hopefully it helped someone else out as well.

[Pepsquad]

If you were to wake up tomorrow, knowing it would be the last time you were ever going to play poker - then yes, poker would be a game of luck.

But when you view poker over the course of years and hundreds of thousands of hands, "luck" has no place in that discussion.

Pep.

[RYL]

[ QUOTE ]
... Hopefully it helped someone else out as well.

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm sure it did. Nice post d10.

[coffeecrazy1]

It seems as though there is a difference, at least in your mind(I'm not disagreeing...I'm just restating what you have said), between a game of skill and a game of chance. You believe poker to be gambling due to the element of luck involved.

I believe that there is an element of luck in everything. For whatever reason, be it God's will or just random occurrence(depending on how you view life), things out of the ordinary happen. That is one main reason my brother loves sports...you might see something you've never seen before.

The dividing line, I believe, between gambling and skill is the effect of time. Over time, in a game of chance, one cannot ever expect to win. Every single casino banks on this principle, and has built multi-billion dollar palaces based on it. Is the house gambling? In a sense, yes, but less so with each passing second. At the end of the day, at the end of the month, at the end of the year, at the end of time, casinos make money, as long as there are gamblers occupying their games.

The same is true of good poker players. Good poker players are the house. There is luck and variance, sure, but over time, the most skilled players end up with the majority of the money. In endgame, the best player will always win.

You are not out of your mind. You are just not seeing the big picture clearly. Luck is never part of the grand scheme of things; what was lucky at the time simply becomes what happened. If you believe poker to be gambling...so be it...give the game up completely, or, to be responsible, set aside a poker allowance for each month. But...I believe that my skill will overwhelm that of the average person at the table, and in the end, I will always win.

If it's between them having luck and me having everything else, I think I'm in a better position every time.

[Bodhi]

[ QUOTE ]
I believe that there is an element of luck in everything.

[/ QUOTE ]

Obviously, you don't play games like Chess or Go.

[Wardfish]

A few random points:

1. Poker for a good player IS gambling in the same way that roulette is to a casino.

2. All other things being equal, a bigger bankroll makes it more likely that you will win in the long run.

3. Dont under-estimate the importance of position when playing in very loose low limit games. You can often limp behind a lot of callers with a speculative hand, as long as you can judge how you stand on later betting rounds. Folding all but premium hands will result in missing some profits.

[Hellmouth]

I believe that this is addressed in the beginning of SSHE. It is a nice article about how poker is gambling. I dont have it with me right now or I would pull some quotes. If anyone else does have a copy it might make a believer out of the nonbelievers.

In fact we are just trying to always make bets when we have the advantage. Making a bet when we do not have the odds is a mistake. However AA does get cracked. It does not make sense that you can lose a game of skill with the best hand in the game (preflop) to someone who stays in with the worst hand in the game (when he/she makes thier boat on the flop) unless there is an element of luck involved.

Greg

[Mayhap]

[ QUOTE ]
Poker is Gambling and I am cetain that understanding this basic concept will do wonderful things for my attitude and my game.

[/ QUOTE ]

Gambling has a certain magnetism to it. It is a domain where you can profit without any hard work; you can succeed serendipitously. This is what makes poker profitable. Players without the will to work at it are attracted to it.

Accomplished players are like cooks at a diner where they make shite sandwiches all day and watch the patrons eat them. But, like any cook at any diner, if you are going to prepare a good shite sandwich, you must have to know how to eat one. Otherwise the diner would go out of business.

Now, I think I'll go have a cup of tea and a few saltines. [img]/images/graemlins/smirk.gif[/img]

/M