Coin flips would involve skill if the probability of one outcome was known to be higher, even by a tiny amount. The skill would be very simple, calling the favored side.
In Prof Meyer's study, 300 poker players took part, playing 60 hands each on tables of six.
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It wasn't 60 hands. It was 60 x 300 hands. Still a small sample but more than 60.
18000 hands played by two different sample groups (experts Vs non experts)and compared. And then 3 variables of hand strength across both samples.
Of course this is different than 1.000.000 hands, but surely they must have found some significant difference in order to publish it." I'm not gonna read the paper", ***but I think it's too easy just to say that it was 60 hands and im not gonna read beyond that cause that makes it rubbish.
"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."
the only time Luck plays a factor in the game of good players that have done their studying and learned how to play the game for what it is , is when theres still cards to come !!!!.
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If all the cards are out the 5 community cards we now have all the information we need to know if we are ahead of the other player or players .
Going into a free for all , all in preflop that just takes away any skill any one has and goes right into luck .the main reason good poker players dont put all their chips at risk early in a tourney or when they dont have a read on a player
Its a very standard set up when you run an experiment.
I'm not saying that I agree with the article's conclusion that poker is all about luck. But I agree that in a short term or small sample scenario, luck might play a bigger role than skills and we all know this. The article does actually recocnises that the better team will win in the long run.
"In all-skill-but-no-luck games, Team 1 always beat Team 2, and Team 2 always beats Team 3 and so on."
This is also a flawed scenerio, because it doesn't account for people or teams having "off days" or the other team learning and improving and winning a game against the better player or team every now and then. How many times have we've seen the obviously best NFL team have an off day and lose against the inferior team that year? Even the absolute best lose from time to time.
So gus201, consider the following situation:
$100 MTT tournament, with satellite entries... ie, some extremely bad players abound.
Your 100th hand of the tournament. You are in the BB with AA. The extremely lucky LAGfish sitting in the CO has you covered. He raises preflop 5xBB. You have seen him do this several times before and has stacked off preflop with marginal hands like KJs and AJo. You re-raise him preflop to 25xBB, everyone else folds, and he shoves. You have about 1000BB behind. Do you call?