Is poker a game of luck most of it?!

Is it? Because if it is how can sombody be ranked as a pro or a starter?

I know the part with the experience and all of that but still every hand is different and i'm thinking of anything you do : call raise act, can be good and bad at a same time in a different way.

In my opinon, and this is just something that puts it all into perspective for me.
Texas Hold Em is:
60% Luck
20% Maths
20% Skill

The 20% Maths is what separates the bad players from the good players
The 20% Skill is what separates the good players from the great players

*Please don't make me add a disclaimer

if u think poker is a game of luck then i suggest u find something else to do lol

Luck is sometime that runs out.

Skill is something that stays with you forever.

To think that luck doesn't play a significant part of the game is to deny that variance exists.

In the short term, luck has a huge influence on the game unless the skill levels are so disparate as to make it so that skilled players are almost always guaranteed to win. Over the long haul and thousands upon hundreds of thousands of hands, having a skill advantage manifests itself in showing you are better than your opponents. This is where the game becomes more about skill than luck.

This is why having appropriate bankroll management is essential to being a poker player vs. a pure gambler. If you do not practice appropriate bankroll management, you are simply gambling, plain and simple. There's nothing wrong with this if you can accept the fact that you are just gambling and looking for a thrill. You can even be gambling with a pretty decent edge... let's say you are a good player and are almost always getting it in ahead and taking away pots in good spots. However, even getting it in ahead in really good situations like being a 3:1 favorite you still have a 1/4 chance of getting beat. String a couple of those 1/4 beats together in a row and you can go bankrupt pretty quickly playing higher than what your bankroll allows for -- even if you are playing perfectly and should be "beating the game".

I like to think of poker as winning a war, and the little battles along the way are only a small part of the bigger picture. You will undoubtedly lose a few battles a long the way, but if you have a solid gameplan and strategy to win the war you will do well in the long run.

poker pays for a pro's rent or mortgage and his/her's other bills. poker is a hobby for an amateur that can be a small addition to regular income(like hustling at pool, darts or other games)

Of course, not!!!)
Are you kidding me?!)
You ought to think and count so as to win the game, and you ask such a question. Yes, there is a bit of luck depending on what cards you receive but the thing is intelligence.

Thank you for wasting your time posting this useless reply.
However this certfies me you didn't understood my point of view.

explain it then since i obv didn't understand it

alan cunningham said it best "poker is 100 percent luck and 100 percent skill"

If you believe poker is a game of base on luck than keep going all in. Join a couple of games and do it. You will understand by your results. LOL

Short-term, very short-term, like hand-for-hand, there is a HUGE amount of luck in poker. Over the long-term though, luck starts to even-out and skill becomes much more important. Now....What exactly defines "long-term" is an open question.

There's luck involved in poker only if you play maybe 1,000 hands or less.

If you play for money and keep going at it, luck is irrelevant, it is only your talent that decides if you win - your ability to make the right decisions.

I compare it to competing in a surfing championship. While performing, you may get some bad waves and some good waves, but at the end of the day you had your chance to show what you can do with a board.

Make that 100,000 hands or less...

I know this theory but what if we take the 100,000 hands one by one?
We treat them as a individual hand. ..
From this point of view there is no long term only more or less individual hands.

But the 'theory' is easily verifiable as any mathematician specialising in probabilities will tell you. 'Luck', or variance will average out over time. It is a statistical fact.

What hands you are dealt and what community cards show up are out of your hands, but how you play the cards that you get is completely up to you. Over 100 000 hands a bad player is going to make a lot of mistakes and hence be a losing player while a good player is not going to make so many mistakes and hence be a winning player. It's what separates Poker from Roulette.

Yes, you are correct and I am also correct.

But which is more important? Surely the amount of money you win or loose over a full year is more important to you than the amount you win or loose in a single hand.

Sorry, man. )
I didn't understand.)

It has been become part of the olympics 2012 in London being a mindgame, so no it is not a luckgame, but luck is involved.

First of all....i dont even want to believe you ask such a thing :P
It is bad to ask this because it is totally not true.
My oppinion is that poker is about luck only untill the first 3 cards hit the board (the flop). From there on out it is all pure MAD SKILLS. And if you dont believe you i will not bring 1000000 arguments for it. I will only say this : check out the internet for poker related videos and see how pro's dominated hands holding pure squadush in their hands and made others throw away winning hands.
Poker is not a game of luck at all , it is a game of patience, intuition, guts aaaaaand soomeetiimes MAYBE a big big maybe just a little bit of luck helps. But see if you doubt what i said , think about it , if you think you are unlucky when playing poker....what do you have to do to turn it all around? VERY SIMPLE fold you hand and wait for a better one. Right the next hand the "luck" as many call it can change and from there on out it's all about you.
Say for example you are dealt a "lucky" monster hand AA, it still doesnt matter if you dont have the skill to play it. You can over bet it and you get no callers. You can try to trap it and by doing that you allow others to crack your aces with better connecting hands or suits or etc etc. Alot of variance , but it's all skill related and intuition. And intuition you train by experience.
Hope my answer was a good one and it will make you change your mind into believing poker is not a game of luck , because it really isnt.

eah it is luck"

I like this post the best. At first i did want to say, "yeah it is luck"! But then after reading this post it did make alot of sense. Nice post!

I think 80% is luck and the other 20% is exprience and knowledge.

Poker in the olympics? That's not right. That can't be right. I would rather see chess in the olympics before poker. And if by chance this is right i'm protesting because they took baseball out of the olympics and replaced it with poker, that just wouldn't make since.

The International Federation of Poker has been accepted into the International Mind Sports Association. This means that poker will join a list of games including Chess, Bridge, and Go as an official game of skill, according to Bluff Magazine Europe.

Enough said?

And no, I don't believe it is part of the Olympics in 2012, however, being accepted into the IMSA is a small first step.

It's hard to put a figure on it. Obviously luck comes into play in most hands but I guess it's people who know when to fold and when to bet can beat "luck". Anyone can hit a fullhouse on the flop against Phil Ivey with crap cards for example with the possibility of a good player hitting top pair and going all the way with it when they are actually crushed. A good player will lay down his top pair, that's where the first guys luck ended with a small pot. He ain't going to be hitting those very often so his stack will begin to dwindle.

In answer to your question though, I'm putting more skill ahead of Luck in poker as people who actually win amounts of money at poker, be it millions are just live of it I'm sure their luck would of ran out by now and actually be losing as opposed to consistently winning money.

For those who don't know how to play it yes, it's a game of luck.
For those (us) who play, we all know that is much more then just luck.

20% luck 90% math

20%+90% = 110% FWIW

[x] I won't mention that you failed

Nice!!

It's half & half in my opinion.

I support my started theory.
Taking hand by hand think about it. . can you really do something wrong / good in less or more way...
From this point of view playing it its wrong to velieve you can't win anything against anyone..

100% luck over 1 hand. The more hands you play the more it becomes skill.

So over an infinite amount of hands its 100% skill.

Eureka!

FINALLY!

A valid answer to this age old question......

Hand by hand? This makes no sense. There is no mathematical reasoning behind your theory. As hands accumulate, and if you make correct decisions to give you +ev play every hand, over 100,000+ hands you WILL see a profit. This is fact. Over the course of 100,000+ hands, you will definitely lose many times when you are ahead, but since you have the edge in most situations the sum of it all will be big gains.

Think about it like a casino. A casino would not stake its entire reserves on a single hand of blackjack, because it knows the odds are very close to 50/50 to win the hand. However, casinos are VERY happy to see hundreds and millions of hands of blackjack being played because they actually do have a small mathematical edge -- about .5% against perfectly played perfect strategy and closer to 2% against usual average play. A 2% edge in any single hand of poker means nothing -- it is a coin toss. But over millions of hands a 2% edge can make you a millionaire, just like a casino can make millions due to the large volume of hands it sees.

That is a perfect analogy.

To the OP: It is pointless to focus on individual hands. The reason that you play poker (assuming that you want to make money) is to take advantage of long term advantages.