20 thoughts on skill vs. chance in poker, part 2: Richard Garfield on luck in...
Dr. Richard Garfield, legendary game designer and creator of Magic: the Gathering, brings an incisive perspective and unique experience to questions of theory in and around games. He recently gave a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
20 thoughts on skill vs. chance in poker, part 3: Outcome-based approaches...
The vast majority of approaches to predominance in poker tend to rely upon empirical evidence of outcomes from real or simulated poker games. Examples include studies that look at the relationship at...
View Article20 thoughts on skill vs. chance in poker, part 4: What if an outcome-based...
While we have seen that an outcome-based approach based on empirical data will vary depending on the player population being observed, a possible means of rectifying this is to fix as constant the...
View Article20 thoughts on skill vs. chance in poker, part 5: On intentionally losing
David Sklansky has popularized an argument for poker being a game of skill based on the fact that a player can deliberately lose at poker, but cannot deliberately guarantee a loss at roulette, craps,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
20 thoughts on skill vs. chance in poker, part 6: An impractical dependence...
All outcome-based approaches to predominance will conclude that a game is predominantly skill if the game is played for long enough. Whether the approach be a measurement of how often the superior...
View Article20 thoughts on skill vs. chance in poker, part 7: Tournaments vs. cash games
Some believe that the fundamental differences between tournament poker and cash game poker are enough to put them into separate classification under predominance. To be sure, on a practical level, the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
20 thoughts on skill vs. chance in poker, part 8: How are we measuring skill,...
At the beginning of this series, I temporarily assumed away that there was a reasonable and consistent means of individually measuring either the amount of skill in a game or the amount of chance in a...
View Article20 thoughts on skill vs. chance in poker, part 9: Common intuitive proxies...
In the last thought, we've seen that there's not a good basis for developing formal, quantitative measures of comparison of skill and chance between games. Slipping away from the abstract and back into...
View Article20 thoughts on skill vs. chance in poker, part 10: Games of skill vs....
Poker is a game of skill.Poker involves skills to play.While both are true, the two phrases have different meanings. Various legal standards of predominance sometimes demand that the lines are blurred...
View Article20 thoughts on skill vs. chance in poker, part 11: Why not blackjack or other...
We've generally restricted our focus so far to symmetric, closed, competitive strategy games (orthogames). Traditional casino gambling almost exclusively consists of one-player "games" played against...
View Article20 thoughts on skill vs. chance in poker, part 12: Why not sports betting and...
Similarly to how games like blackjack are not quite of the same fundamental structure as poker, activities like sports betting, horse racing, prop betting, and stock investing, which I will...
View Article20 thoughts on skill vs. chance in poker, part 13: On control and equal...
One common approach to considering the nature of the role of chance in a game is to focus on the degree to which the players and their actions or decisions exhibit control over the outcome. Certainly,...
View Article20 thoughts on skill vs. chance in poker, part 14: Does rate of showdown matter?
A simple, popular outcome-based approach to predominance considers how often real-world hands of a particular poker variant end in a showdown. Intuitively, the argument here is that, when a hand ends...
View Article20 thoughts on skill vs. chance in poker, part 15: Does rake matter?
Most of our analysis so far has treated poker on its fundamental merits, ignoring or dismissing its social association with casino gambling. Whatever poker actually has in common with casino games is...
View Article20 thoughts on skill vs. chance in poker, part 16: Does duplicate poker have...
Duplicate poker is a poker variant which attempts to reduce the impact on game outcomes of the intrinsic randomness from the shuffle of the cards. The general principle is that two poker games take...
View Article20 thoughts on skill vs. chance in poker, part 17: Why does poker need...
Some competitive games other than poker have randomness that would ideally be removed and could be removed without changing the strategy and appeal of the game. The toy game example of rando chess,...
View Article20 thoughts on skill vs. chance in poker, part 18: The relationship between...
In addition to the practical reasons that poker needs randomness as discussed in the previous thought, many players will say that another reason that poker "needs" randomness is for various reasons of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
20 thoughts on skill vs. chance in poker, part 19: The German "predominantly...
I had always imagined that one of the points I'd write about in this essay would be how no academic studies have ever concluded that poker is predominantly chance, but the recently-published paper out...
View ArticleClik here to view.
20 thoughts on skill vs. chance in poker, part 20: Summary and assessment of...
To bring our long journey to a close, it is worthwhile to condense the wide array of different perspectives we've treated on predominance of skill and chance into one central list. If predominance is a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
20 thoughts on skill vs. chance in poker
This essay was originally published in twenty parts, one at a time over the course of the month of September, in one post per day. To view any specific thought as its own page, use this index,...
View Article
