Poker, Skill or Luck? what %

Let's say we have KK v. our opponent's AA. AIPF. (is this unlucky?)

Flop: KAK (is this lucky?)

Turn: A (unlucky again?)

Everything above has nothing to do with luck. It will happen (albeit rarely). No magic potions or charms will change it (no luck involved).

Now if the river brings a 5th K or A and the all chips are returned, that's lucky (and most likely a Pinochle deck).

What does it mean for a game to have 60% luck? You're making statements (not only making them, contradicting a previous one) and not defining terms. You're trying to assign numbers to something without them having a meaning.

Do you mean that since it's 40% skill the best player in the world would win 40% of the time? (and of course you didn't specify timeframe. We all agree infinite time = 100% skill, but is this one hand? One session? One week?) Of course that makes no sense because even in a 100% luck scenario the best player would win 50%. There is a reason I'm asking this, I'd like to know what you guys mean by percentage luck. If you can define it, we can actually use PT databases to quantify it. But as long as these numbers don't actually mean anything we can't have a meaningful discussion. I think that tree over there is 65% luck btw, and the brick wall is only 29% luck.

Did you read the articles? AA can lose many times its not a royal flush. Point is that in a long term AA wins more often then KK. its just that stuff happens. Its simple probablility stuff.

That would mean that if I was the most skilled I could expect to win 75% of the pots I enter. Clearly absurd.

IMO, this question can NOT be answered until the concept of luck is defined.

exactly. I just want a definition from people making claims. Apparently it's too much to ask.

16% of this post is luck.

By my calculations this thread is 44.2% skill, 55.8% luck out of 43 trials. Unless I miscounted.

Is it sad that I actually figured out that the word luck constituted 16% of the total characters in that post? Please don't answer that.

60% of all statistics are completely made up, 25% of the time.

70 percent skill 30 percent luck

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If your playing in a friendly home game or, low limit, bluffing is nearly meaningless as the cost of staying in a hand will have many players calling with almost anything in hope of chasing a hand and, getting lucky. However if you sit at table in a casino with a pro the average player's chances of winning over an eight hour period are zero.

How is it that someone cant say that it is unlucky to lose with AA, instead it is variance? Same damn thing. You know what my variance is: my bad luck that my hand didnt hold up. Also with this variance thing, I know that it is supposed to turn around at some point, like what 500,000 hands? Is it 1,000,000 hands? Perhaps it is like 50 years? I can safely say that I have Poker Tracker stats on quite a few hands and yet has the magical variance ever to swing greatly in my favour. It does give me some hope though. Everytime I sit down, I am like yeah, even though I will get my money in with the best hand, perhaps today is the day that those hands will actually hold up, perhaps today is the day that variance will be on my side! =D

obv none lol poker is rigged duh....

but i agree skill in the long run , luck plays a factor in the short run

i believe poker is mostly skill untill u go all in heads up.

sure it takes some bit of luck to get the hands, but you can get AK 5 times in a row, and each time you miss the flop, a skilled player with a worse hand is gonna pick it up and put you off your hand.

luck is just a combination of opportunity and timing. . .skill will pay out over the long run dont get discourged over a string of bad beats it happens to us all

i joke around a lot, but once in a while i may give some serious advice....this is one of them. please don't take it as offense.

i hear people talk about swings and variance often, it can be misleading. don't blame it on variance that you're losing money. sometimes there's no magic word like "variance" that is going to save you and turn a losing player around in the long run. you see, it only works if you're a WINNING player.....meaning that on average you play better than your competition. a lot of people think they're good in poker and make the right decisions most of the time, i know.......so when they lose, they think that it's only a matter of time till things get better because of a bad swing. wrong formula.

note that if there's a losing player that hit the good side of his variance, can be misleading also. <--------this is the drug that attracts most donators.

i don't know whether or not you win money in poker but you may have to change the way you play a little bit.

so i don't sound like an arrogant prick.....i too lose often and donate a lot to poker players.


-m

I got into an arguement about a guy going all-in with AcJc - he was UTG+1 and went all-in. This was a 9 person sit-n-go and he only had 1200 in chips left and I had knocked out the 1st 4 people (starting chip stack 3000) I now had over 15000+ in chips with 5 players left everyone folded to my in the BB with 4c5c. I called... He was like WTF man what a stupid call. Oh the blinds where 200-400 - The way I looked at it was that I was most likely a 60-40% dog, but I had a huge stack and I could knock someone out of the tournament and I already had 400 in the pot I only had to call 800 to win 3000 in chips (the UTG did call 400, but was obz folding even if I folded or called).

I felt like I had good odds to call and I could knock off another player + pick-up some chips. He said I was an idiot for calling and that I was ssooo lucky.

What do you guys think luck or skill? I believe I took a chance and gambled, but I also didn't do this blindly and without realizing the implications. I would still have PLENTY of chips and only double up the idiot anyway if I lost which was no big deal to me. Winning however would have taken out another player and make my stack that much bigger all for 800 chips out of my 15000+ chips stack.

We then had a discussion about luck and poker. I said he was lucky he wasn't dominated by AQ or AK and he said it was such a small chance anyone had AK or AQ and I ask why? The deal is completely random. I understand that if he has an ace there is only 3 left in the deck. I said I may have won with a 40% chance of winning, but I said again he was "lucky" that someone didn't have AQ or AK and I believe that is where luck comes into poker.

When you go all-in with any hand other than AA pre-flop you are taking a risk that you are an underdog. When you are called by a hand that has a lower % to win pre-flop and you don't have AA you where lucky you didn't run into a better hand. Does this make sense?

If its Tuesday, its 30-70, on the weekends its 90-10.

Your joking, but you have a point sorta. I've noticed that I get badbeat on the weekends more than weekdays. Why? More time, more players, more lucky ass fish on the weekends to bad beat tight ass players like me.

You can twist statistics to make them get your message across anyway you like, eg 20% of fatal road traffic accidents are caused by impaired drivers, therefore 80% were sober, it stands to reason statistically it's safer to drive drunk? ( I don't think so ). As for the luck factor, just think about the unlucky fella in British Columbia yesterday, walking down the street and gets killed by a helicopter crashing. Makes a runner runner suckout seem pretty lame.

Actually that is a logical fallacy. If 99% of the drivers on the road are sober and 1% were impaired, that means that a disproportionate amount of impaired drivers caused fatal accidents. I get the point of twisting statistics, but this is just a logical fallacy, using data and making a claim when the data doesn't support the claim. But I do get your point kind of, although I still don't think any of this applies when all the numbers are literally being made up.


lol yeah, pretty sure life is 80% luck, 20% skill

One way you could look at it is to look at the winners of freerolls and see what % are repeat winners and what % are first time winners.

If you assume first time winners won by luck and repeat winners won by skill, then you have an estimate of what % is luck and what % is skill

Luck you say. Very slipperly slope for anyone one who wants to have a true certainty. It belongs on that shelf with God discussions,politics and UFO's. My point is what is luck? Can you have bad or good luck? Are some people luckier than others. I mean can you be lucky in love and unlucky in poker? Now this is my humble opinion, Skill allows you to exploit your luck to maximize your profit or minimize losses over long haul. Skill will keep you alive in a MTT when shortstacked and card dead. Skill will produce consitence proveable results (stats) over the long haul. Luck many times ,I thought I was just lucky, but after careful examination I found however a slight improvement in my game that help me make the right decision based on experience. I cant totally say that happens all the time either. Sometimes my skill just gets me there to be either lucky or unlucky? I want to beieve that our state of mind ( assholes aren't luckier I HOPE) determines our luck factor. That all players have equal amount of it. Now Guys this is just my humble opinion.......I'm just saying......

more like skils=70% Luck 30% Ithink
Graver69

The biggest factors probably depend on what, who, and how you are playing.

Here is my 2 cents.
If all players only play "the cards" and not each individual players ability at the game then yes it is all luck, you cant know exactly what cards will be dealt.
But, if you are playing against individuals who have, and we all have,
quirks, tells, emotions, and not just "the cards" and can read these
shortcomings then I would have to say that 90% skill, 10% luck is my
call.

Keep up the good work everyone.

4999Perish

Poker is 90% Skill and 50% Luck

lol, define what you mean. We can't get anywhere with people just spewing out numbers that have no meaning whatsoever. Did you know poker is also 70% gold, 20% silver, and 10% bronze?

Excellent. In a nutshell ... AA winning 75%, over 1 million hands (in YOUR hand). You wake up to AA 6 times a day. You need Tracker to record 166,667 days of (your) AA hands. that's only 456 years (and 7 months). You will only face losing your AA for 114 years (and 2 months), in whatever 'variance' order they come.

In defining 'luck', the parameters aren't there for an exact definition, IMO. What i do believe is that 'luck' factors in most in poker when playing NL games and betting all-ins PRE-river card. Unless you have a superuser account, there is NO WAY to know what is coming from the dealer next. Betting on unseen cards is the 'luck' factor.

Call it 'variance, that's poker, coolers, or..?' if you want, but when a player goes all-in against an unfinished board, it's nothing more than finding out what Lady Luck will do to you TODAY.

Ok, I'm defining luck as a deviance from the expected. Lets say you're in a situation where you expect to win 36% of the time (ie. hitting your flush draw,) and you win, you got lucky. Lets say that you're in that situation a thousand times and you win 357 of them, that's slightly unlucky, but well within a standard deviation. Now if you were to win 450 of them on the other hand that would be phenomenally lucky, but considering the huge number of poker hands people play I have little doubt someone experienced this in their lifetime. If they were to have that situation 100,000 times and won 50,000 of them there'd almost certainly be cheating involved, just because the chance of that occurring is so incredibly small. So fewer hands means greater impact of luck, more hands is less luck, to say how much luck is a factor without defining over what period of time, and the skill differential, to say any particular value for luck or skill is meaningless.

For those interested a bit more there was a good article on probability in Scientific American a few years ago, (not exactly about poker however) that's online now at Miracle on Probability Street by Michael Shermer. When you hear about people's successes or failures at poker, people are much more likely to talk about improbable events so it seems like they happen a lot more often so you get a magnifying effect in that way, not to mention poker players, *gasp*, lie, so I'm guessing luck seems like a much larger factor than it really is in poker especially over the long term.

Yes poker is partly luck and partly skill but I believe a whole lot of it is position and what you do in position that will help the most

Actually, how about just a thousand, that means you'll have 700 hold up all but a significantly insignificant amount of the time (ie if 700 or more didn't you'd have proof it was rigged), and at least 725/1000 hold up 96.6% of the time. So that's a factor of a thousand, so instead of the 114 years, that's about 6 weeks. Much more realistic. So yes going all-in with cards to come is certainly going to suffer some short-term variance. But if you go all-in preflop with AA you are going to win more than you lose, and if you play a significant amount of time (I see AA an average of much more than 6 times a day, actually more than twice that on my average day of 3k hands). So if I play for about 3 weeks I'll have a 97% chance of winning at least 72.5% when the true average is 75%. That's not bad. Alternatively though, know that variance goes the other way. Some players will win with AA 85% in a week sometimes, but if you play long-term, you will win getting your money in good. And short term, you have a better chance of winning than losing if you get your money in good.

ALSO, realize that winning with AA is also variance, as the true mean is 75% and you won 100% of the money.

What a good tournament player is capable of doing is stack building. So when they lose their percentage hand (suck out) they are better able to absorb the loss. Poker is percentages and position, I was the reason I liked the 45c hand earlier in the thread, 60/40 ish 800 into 3000. its a call all day but only if you can afford the chips. i deviate from percentages dependant on my stack at time.

Just remember in tournaments chips are ammunition, nothing else. The weakest players will win a big pot and be unwilling to commit chips after, afraid to lose them.

Cash games are totally different of course.