I see a lot of poker talk about luck and people say things like it is 50% luck and 50% skill others say it is 80% skill and 20% luck or 80% luck and 20% skill.
anyone that just makes a blanket statement like that has no idea what they are talking about. I am sorry if that appears disrespectful. I am a maths and statistics student and basically there is something called the central limit theorem.
Now some games a strong shark will have only 1% or 2% edge in and thus over a short sample size it is almost entirely luck. However over a large sample size that 1% or 2% edge can become massively significant once the sample size is large enough. variance (what the niave person calls luck) becomes smaller and smaller as our sample size increases. if we have a 1% or 2% edge over ten games our result is almost entirely due to variance/luck. if however we run such a situation 100s of thousands of time their is almost no luck at all it is entirely skill.
for example lets say we have a 2% ROI in six max hyper turbos then putting this into a poker variance simulator i get with a 95% confidence interval
over 200 games (-$300, $360) almost entirely luck based
over 2000 games (-$720, $1200) still mostly luck based
over 20000 games (-$1110, $5430) can still be hard hit due to bad luck
over 200000 games ($15510, $30480) luck is still a factor but now our confidence interval does not contain 0 and thus we can be confident it now unlikely for us to lose money over this sample size in fact the 99% interval also only contains positive figures.
if we take a less variant form of poker say we have a 5% edge in six max standard game or a double or nothing then we get the following
over 200 games (-$111, $222)
over 2000 games ($51, $1029)
over 20000 games ($3555,$6876)
over 200000 games we get ($47079, $57195)
again we can see in a small sample size it is very much luck based but in a large sample size our results depend much more on skill.
of course this is not actually how you work out confidence intervals this is a variance simulator
https://www.primedope.com/tournament-variance-calculator/
poker is part luck part skill depending on your edge and the poker variant and the number of games you play the ratio of luck to skill will vary.
their is no fixed number it depends on all these factors.
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