Skill and luck, what's the ratio? |
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Posted Tue Feb 08, 2005 1:21 am GMT by UATrewqaz
I've been playing alot and studying the game for about 7 months now and I feel I've made very good progress for such a short period of time. I've gone from a player who consistently finished a little bit down to a player who consistenly finishs a little (sometimes alot :D ) up. (mostly low limit games at PP, and recently SNG's).
I had a discussion with a friend this weekend about the skill and luck factors in the game. To me the game seems to be about 70% skill and 30% luck, my friend said she felt it was more like 65% vs 35%. What do you all think?
My own theory is that the lower the limits/stakes the luck factor increases, due to the randomness of play. However as the limits go up the skill portion goes up.
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Posted Tue Feb 08, 2005 2:00 am GMT by snoogins47
This question is really unanswerable, and hardly even relevant.
In a long enough run, it's almost essentially 100% skill, meaning that it is very unlikely that over a lengthy career that a poor player will win more money than a great player.
In a short run environment, "luck" is a very large factor, obviously. Probably much higher than most people would like to admit.
The key, I think, is to ignore this so-called ratio, and try to ignore the luck aspect as much as possible. Look at it as gambling, but (hopefully) with an edge. Luck is going to determine whether or not you win or lose a single tournament, or a single hand, but the point isn't to win pots: it's to win money.
As for different types of games and scenarios, here we could probably give a more reasonable estimate of this so-called ratio, if for no reason other than to spur some discussion and make this thread interesting.
For example, the results of a single low buy-in Sit'n'go tournament on Partypoker, as a rough estimate on my part, I would say that luck accounts for probably 75%. If we were to set up a 10 person freezeout that say, had blinds of .10/.20, and everybody started with $5,000, and it was a pot limit format, skill might get an edge up to as high as 75% or so. Note that these are just random estimates for fun, and if you want to argue them, please do so 
Posted Thu Feb 24, 2005 9:35 pm GMT by TheMinigambler
After you see 10,000 plus hands, this question will seem silly to you.
Posted Fri Feb 25, 2005 1:14 am GMT by suitedaces84
In terms of stats. it will go a little something like this:
% luck = k/(n)^.5, where k is a constant and n is the number of hands you play.
So, to summarize, what the last two posters said. There's a lot of luck in the short term, very little luck in the long term. If you've played a lot of poker the amount of money your up or down will have a very close relationship to the quality of poker you've played. There is no way to win in the long run without playing well and vice versa.
Posted Fri Feb 25, 2005 8:56 pm GMT by gol4pro
Interesting suitedaces.... very interesting. Where'd you get that?
Posted Fri Feb 25, 2005 9:51 pm GMT by suitedaces84
It's just a fundamental law of statistics. The margin of error is equal to 1/(n)^.5. n being the number of samples. So when you see canidate x is ahead 55 to 45 with a 5% margin of error, they got the 5% from number of people they interviewed.
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