poker players overestimate the skill factor in their play

deucem

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I found this story today.......You are not as good a poker player as you thought........


A new study reveals that humanity is designed to underestimate the laws of luck in games like poker.


Where is the line dividing luck and skill? How much does chance determine success?

It turns out that, from sport to the stock market, we are constantly deluded by an illusion of order, when in fact we are assailed by randomness. And a study released this month (August) claims that, in one area where we ultimately expect skill to triumph - namely poker - we may be far more at the mercy of fortune than we believe.

Anyone who has ever played Texas hold 'em or the like thinks they know how much talent is involved. But, according to Professor Gerhard Meyer, of the University of Bremen's Institute of Psychology and Cognition Research, they are wrong. He says that we are, as in so many parts of our life, fooled by randomness into believing that we are masters of our destiny.

Poker, he insists, is largely a game of chance. Some games are clearly luck - roulette, for instance - while others, like chess, are matters of pure skill. But, as Meyer explains, "most games are heterogeneous, because they involve both chance and skill, and poker falls into this category". The question is, how much skill is involved? Meyer's study found that the workings of randomness far outweigh the importance of talent or hard work.

This result does not surprise Michael Mauboussin, who is an investment strategist and the author of The Success Equation, which examines the boundaries between luck and skill. He says that it is very difficult for humans to tell luck and skill apart. We are simply not designed to notice randomness.

This disconnect is perhaps most visible, he says, in sport. "Imagine a continuum, with all-luck-no-skill on the left and all-skill-no-luck on the right," he says. "In all-luck-no-skill, games might as well be the toss of a coin; in all-skill-no-luck, Team 1 always beats Team 2, Team 2 always beats Team 3, and so on." Using a computer algorithm, Mauboussin has compared these scenarios to real life. Most team sports, he says, are about halfway along the spectrum.

Over the course of a long season, the best teams tend to win, and the worst to lose. But that is the product of a large sample: in the short run, randomness reigns. Several bad results in a row will be ascribed to poor form - but it could simply be the equivalent of a series of tails coming up in a coin-toss.

Indeed, the evidence that such a thing as form exists is, at best, equivocal. "There are some sports where it may be a factor," says Mauboussin. "Bowling and archery are two of them. But for the most part it doesn't exist. Yet as a player, or as a fan watching the game, you sense it; it's a strange mirage."

In Prof Meyer's study, 300 poker players took part, playing 60 hands each on tables of six. They were divided into "expert" and "average" players, and their ability to make money from good, bad and average hands was assessed. It turned out that - as you might expect - "expert" players lost less money on bad hands; but surprisingly, they did no better than average players on mediocre hands and even made slightly less on good ones. The conclusion, says Meyer, is that "poker players overestimate the skill factor in their play".

It is not just sport where this applies, but the stock market, too. Some years ago, Professor Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist and the author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, analysed the work of financial traders. He found that while the traders themselves had a subjective experience of making sensible predictions of complex scenarios with great skill, they were in fact playing a game based almost entirely on luck.

"The test of skill is whether you get the same individuals consistently doing well," he explains. "With stock-picking, different people do well every year; someone who did well one year had no advantage the next."

This tendency to imagine order where there is only randomness has been observed for decades. Kahneman tells a story about London during the Second World War. Towards the end of the conflict, the city was bombarded with V2 missiles. Newspapers noticed that the strikes were clustered in various areas. It was suggested that the reason was that they were targeted at working-class districts, or that German spies were living in the unaffected regions.

A statistician called William Feller eventually explained the real reason: the pattern of clusters and empty spaces was exactly what you'd expect if the distribution was indeed purely random. But to the human brain, hungry for meaning, it looked like the product of deliberate targeting.

The question is, why are humans so keen to see patterns where there are none? Part of the reason is a phenomenon called hindsight bias. "If I say that what'll happen in the future will be a mixture of luck and skill, you'll nod and agree," says Mauboussin. "But once it's happened, we forget that, and attribute it to skill."

This is dictated in part by our need to explain our experiences in terms of a causal story. "There's a part of our brain that's called the interpreter," he says. "It's designed to make sense of what we've seen, to give it a narrative. And we always see causes; so if Person A succeeds where Person B fails, we assume that Person A had some skill that Person B didn't.

"Even when we know it's random, we can't help but see the workings of skill."

This hyperactive pattern-detector is likely to be an evolutionary adaptation, says Kahneman: a false positive will generally be less harmful than a false negative, an imagined tiger less of a problem than an unnoticed one. "There will be evolutionary advantages to being hypersensitive to clues in the environment, to patterns," he says.

Teasing out the role of chance is controversial. For his part, Mauboussin thinks that poker may involve a little more skill than Meyer believes: "There's a simple test for whether something is a game of skill: can you lose on purpose? In roulette, no; in poker, yes." Professor Meyer agrees that the difference between good and bad players may be visible in the long run, but for most casual players of internet poker, he says, the randomness plays the decisive role.

Either way, poker can certainly reveal to us the biases in our thinking, says Todd Simkin, a financial trader who now uses it to teach strategy to other traders. Humans are are obsessed with outcomes, he says. "You have to distinguish the outcome from the decision process." So we tend to credit a player with doing well if a long shot comes off - or a trader if his high-risk stock pick comes good.

But, he says, that's not how we should work. "Say you bet, and the next card [which you need] is the six of clubs," he says. "That's irrelevant. What matters is that there were only three sixes in the pile, and 40 other cards. You got lucky." He uses the game to teach the risks of hindsight bias to traders.

Almost all areas of life are plagued by randomness, but our story-loving brains find it almost impossible to see. "It takes a lot of discipline to think abstractly," says Mauboussin. "It's amazing, in sport for instance, how few people - even coaches, or reporters - notice it... we're fooled by randomness all the time. The important thing is what we do about it."

The story is here:

http://www.smh.com.au/executive-style/culture/luck-of-the-draw-20120829-250hc.html#ixzz25XmBgkJf
 
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Ronaldadio

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Makes a lot of sense.

If you accept that luck plays a big part in poker, to me where luck comes in big style is `when` luck helps you out.

For example, if you are playing a $1 6 player SNG and you are down to heads up. You get your chips in with AA and it holds. Great, you win about $3

If the same player is on the bubble in the wsop with AA and they are cracked, he loses $0000000`s

Some people are destined to suck out in the big games, some are not.

Having said that, poker is not a pure random game
 
fletchdad

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I am too tired to read the link, but based on what you pasted above, 2 things jump to immediate attention.


1.
"In Prof Meyer's study, 300 poker players took part, playing 60 hands each on tables of six. They were divided into "expert" and "average" players, and their ability to make money from good, bad and average hands was assessed. It turned out that - as you might expect - "expert" players lost less money on bad hands; but surprisingly, they did no better than average players on mediocre hands and even made slightly less on good ones. The conclusion, says Meyer, is that "poker players overestimate the skill factor in their play"."
^^^^ First, who get to categorize the players as "expert" etc? And 60 hands??? hmmmmm

2.
"But, he says, that's not how we should work. "Say you bet, and the next card [which you need] is the six of clubs," he says. "That's irrelevant. What matters is that there were only three sixes in the pile, and 40 other cards. You got lucky." He uses the game to teach the risks of hindsight bias to traders."

^^^^ Was the bet to draw a 6 of clubs?? So many things wrong with the hand analysis and its conclusion. So many factors not explained. Cant even begin to say why this line of thinking is wrong....


From what I read, these guys dont understand how holdem is played, and what dynamics are involved..

Sure, luck is involved. Ask any tourney player if they need to get lucky to win. Sure they do, but the skill is so paramount to constant winners..... They dont rely on luck, they simply welcome it.....
 
deucem

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Makes a lot of sense.

If you accept that luck plays a big part in poker, to me where luck comes in big style is `when` luck helps you out.

For example, if you are playing a $1 6 player SNG and you are down to heads up. You get your chips in with AA and it holds. Great, you win about $3

If the same player is on the bubble in the WSOP with AA and they are cracked, he loses $0000000`s

Some people are destined to suck out in the big games, some are not.

Having said that, poker is not a pure random game
And.......

"Say you bet, and the next card [which you need] is the six of clubs," he says. "That's irrelevant. What matters is that there were only three sixes in the pile, and 40 other cards. You got lucky." ...............

A good player would know the odds of hitting that 6.
 
BigCountryAA

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LOL 60 hands as a base for this study is ridiculous. These people that don't understand how the game is played other then the bare basics shouldn't be making such concrete conclusions or doing studies that are biased like this one is.

He obviously wanted the study to show it was luck or he would have brought in known poker winners and not self proclaimed experts. He would have also had them play way more then 60 hands.


The skill in poker isn't all about what card you are getting. This is the point he is missing. It involves a lot of things. Knowing when to fold, reading your opponent for tells and betting patterns, Knowing the odds and using them to your advantage and plenty more.


Of course there is some luck involved in the short term but if you give me the nuts vs a garbage hand 10 hands in a row he may win a couple of times but He'll still be a broke ass bitch after it's over.
 
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always2away

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I can't help but think that a certain human trait of assessing ourselves in a more favourable light than reality is coming into play here.

For example, most people rate their driving ability at well above average, with the apex of the bell falling nearer to 75-80% of the curve than at 50% where it belongs.

I guess to be human is to be self-deluded.
 
Charade You Are

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The professor considers himself an expert on pathological gambling - he knows nothing about poker obviously.
 
Ronaldadio

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And.......

"Say you bet, and the next card [which you need] is the six of clubs," he says. "That's irrelevant. What matters is that there were only three sixes in the pile, and 40 other cards. You got lucky." ...............

A good player would know the odds of hitting that 6.
Not sure what you are saying in relation to my post.
All I was saying was that in my opinion the luck factor in poker (or any sport/ game for that matter) is when the event happens, not the event.
The fact a good poker player knows what he/ she knows does not matter if the outcome is they win $3 knowing they were ahead and lose $000000`s knowing they were ahead. I know this is results orientated, but I think we were talking about luck?
 
deucem

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From what I read, these guys dont understand how holdem is played, and what dynamics are involved.......
Perhaps we could get the good Professor to study the CC freerolls for a year.(oops maybe I should get my 1000 posts up and ask - can I play please sir....):pcguru:
 
deucem

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Not sure what you are saying in relation to my post.
All I was saying was that in my opinion the luck factor in poker (or any sport/ game for that matter) is when the event happens, not the event.
The fact a good poker player knows what he/ she knows does not matter if the outcome is they win $3 knowing they were ahead and lose $000000`s knowing they were ahead. I know this is results orientated, but I think we were talking about luck?
What I was trying to say is that most poker players believe that the good player makes his/her own luck...
 
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Seems like a stupid study, obv ther is luck involved, hence players dropping 20bis over small samples. Over larger samples skill is the predominating factor, you don't need studies for this, SS is enough.
 
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Seems like a stupid study, obv ther is luck involved, hence players dropping 20bis over small samples. Over larger samples skill is the predominating factor, you don't need studies for this, SS is enough.

Not just stupid, badly handled with poor methodology. Crap like this always pisses me off, it's shit like this why there's so much pseudoscience bullcrap around.
 
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I know alot of you dotn agree, but Ive always said poker is 75% luck. You can be the best in the world but with out getting cards you look like the worst. And we all remember those big bad beats, and getting mad about it calling them a lucky SOB. Sometimes patience can turn your luck around but on those days when its going your way, seems like you can play anything and hit with it. And Id rather be lucky than good any day of the week.
 
Poker Orifice

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And Id rather be lucky than good any day of the week.
I prefer being good. Sure you might get lucky 'a day' of the week... but what about the next day? ... week? ... year? Unless your lucky day meant binking some massive score (but then again, that would more likely need to be 5+ days if in a big tourney).

Agreed that this study is ridiculously bad. As soon as I read '60hands' I didn't bother to read any more of it (aside from what others had quoted). How can you even read past the '60hand' part?

This thread should be moved to 'tilt' section imo
 
BigCountryAA

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I prefer being good. Sure you might get lucky 'a day' of the week... but what about the next day? ... week? ... year? Unless your lucky day meant binking some massive score (but then again, that would more likely need to be 5+ days if in a big tourney).

Agreed that this study is ridiculously bad. As soon as I read '60hands' I didn't bother to read any more of it (aside from what others had quoted). How can you even read past the '60hand' part?

This thread should be moved to 'tilt' section imo

This. I'd prefer being skilled and having the lucky players hand me the chips that they donked off someone else later in a tournament. Don't get me wrong I agree some luck is always involved but the skilled player will always come out ahead in the long run.
 
Vollycat

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A WHOLE 60 hands....wow, such great conclusions. This is why when the noobs start crying about a bad beat it is so boring to explain yet again. Or when someone buys a software program and then starts complaining that KK is a loser over his last 1200 hands played.

NEXT TO NO statistical realness can be understood from a poker player that does not have well over 100,000 hands played--and that is only scratching the surface.

I echo everyone here: This is a worthless paper beyond a discussion for entertainment.
 
mrmonkey

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Obviously the study part of the article is flawed, but I do agree with the main sentiment of the article in that *most* poker players do tend to overlook the role that luck plays in the game... particularly anyone who has not played more than 1,000,000 hands or so (which is probably a great majority of casual or semi-serious players). It can also become a bane to people who tie their ego in with their perceived skill or monetary results at the poker table.

I think most people know that in any single session luck plays a very significant role in the outcome. However, I think many players underestimate how much luck can play a factor over the course of 50,000 hands... 100,000 hands... even all the way up to and beyond 1,000,000 hands.

This variance simulator is a good eye opener for many players:
http://www.evplusplus.com/poker_tools/variance_simulator/

Over 1,000,000 hands, the gap between the same exact player's best run vs. his worst run can be a difference of around 60,000bb. To put that in more relatable terms, a moderate winning player (4bb/100 expected winrate) grinding 25nl playing the exact same game against the exact same opponents over 1,000,000 hands could be up about $2,500 (0.5bb/100) or $15,000 (6.5bb/100)... all depending on variance. A breakeven player over that same million hand stretch could be either up $6250 (+2.5bb/100) or down $7500 (-3.0bb/100).

Also, poker is a very difficult game to gauge just how skilled you are since the very thing that typically measures a players skill (winrate) is something that is heavily influenced by luck. This is why things such as detailed hand-by-hand session review are so very important, as it can give you a much better idea about how you are playing vs. just looking at your winrate or winnings. It also shows why it is so very important to find ways to offset or limit variance, by taking advantage of things such as rakeback and other offers/promotions whenever available. Also, the very best way to be a winning player is to be so good that even the worst luck still allows you to be a winning player... which means study, practice, discipline to continue getting more skilled in poker knowledge, self-control, and efficacy in use of bankroll and time.
 
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BelgoSuisse

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Obviously the study part of the article is flawed, but I do agree with the main sentiment of the article in that *most* poker players do tend to overlook the role that luck plays in the game...

This.

But it's not just about poker. Most people tend to overlook the role that luck plays in life. Especially in the US where there is the myth of the self made man, i..e that with hard work you can make it anywhere. Truth is that in life as in poker, hard work can change your EV, but luck will have tremendous effect on your $$ result.

I guess it's even more difficult to get that concept when your father was named George Wilcken Romney.
 
Arjonius

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It's a matter of interpretation. If for example, we posit a two-player game where player A has a 2% advantage over player B, then the result of any single iteration is highly luck-dependent. That never changes no matter the sample size.

However, the cumulative result over many iterations is that A is a big winner, similar to how casinos make a lot of money from the small edge they have at roulette. Poker is somewhat different since the edge is skill-based, not designed into how the betting works. As a result, it's not consistent. But the underlying principle is unchanged. The player who has an advantage over the long run will win.
 
Ronaldadio

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Also, poker is a very difficult game to gauge just how skilled you are since the very thing that typically measures a players skill (winrate) is something that is heavily influenced by luck. This is why things such as detailed hand-by-hand session review are so very important, as it can give you a much better idea about how you are playing vs. just looking at your winrate or winnings. It also shows why it is so very important to find ways to offset or limit variance, by taking advantage of things such as rakeback and other offers/promotions whenever available. Also, the very best way to be a winning player is to be so good that even the worst luck still allows you to be a winning player... which means study, practice, discipline to continue getting more skilled in poker knowledge, self-control, and efficacy in use of bankroll and time.

This was my point, but put across a lot better.

I'd much rather be a lucky player that sucks out and wins $100,000 first prize, than an outstanding `grinder` playing $20 NLHE month after month
 
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While the study doesn't have a lot of evidence, I agree with the message behind this. I always preach that poker is aat least 90% luck. What separates the very best players from good players is an umeasurable amount of luck that they had in their careers (whether it was winning that flip at a final table or having their hand hold deep in a tournament). Luck is such a huge factor in the game, and not many people know how to quantify exactly how much luck is involved.
 
Ronaldadio

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Is it too simple to say it is 50/ 50 when it comes to luck in a HU poker game?

Imagine, if both players went all in preflop every hand, over a massive period of time and hands, they would be equal ?

The skill factor comes in when, for example, you fold 72o in stead of going all in.

I know this is not an exact science, but there must be a formula that can work out luck v skill ?

The luck v skill is a question that if it could be answered I think it would bring a lot of karma to a lot of people :)
 
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It's funny how people complain about this study because of the small hand sample. The studio says that poker is mostly luck, and you're just confirming it by saying 60 hands is mostly luck.

Of course, on the long run, the luck factor tends to 0 and the skill factor tends to 1. Even a game such as "coinflips with 0.50001 chance of tails" is skill on the very long run, but almost totally luck on the short run.
 
fletchdad

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It's funny how people complain about this study because of the small hand sample. The studio says that poker is mostly luck, and you're just confirming it by saying 60 hands is mostly luck.

Of course, on the long run, the luck factor tends to 0 and the skill factor tends to 1. Even a game such as "coinflips with 0.50001 chance of tails" is skill on the very long run, but almost totally luck on the short run.



I sincerely hope this is a joke........... Yea, coin flips are skill....lmao
 
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