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Comment by bush-bby | Hacker News Reader

>However, it is important to distinguish poker from a pure game of chance, like roulette.

I feel like this is becoming an all too common trope on social media and for young people, where poker is portrayed as a risky but cool thing to do because you can convince people you’re skilled or better than others at it, and that means taking other peoples money with skill. Which is indeed something cool. Sure there’s reading people. But it’s a game of chance. Selling it as something more has literally no benefit.

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That's a naive view of poker, which is absolutely a game of skill. You can't force a good hand, but you can use your understanding of probability and human behavior to estimate the value of the hand you are dealt. The bets you place can be more important than the hands themselves. In fact, the best hand can lose you a lot of money if you play it wrong.

Those two things, skill and chance, are not mutually exclusive characteristics. My point is more so that poker should not be treated as if all the skill in the world can account for all the bad luck in the world. I mean there’s a reason there’s no equivalent of the patriots in professional poker. No one is going to win every single game every single time. And I think that forgetting that in the games portrayal is moderately dangerous. Because it is a game played with money. Sure you can mitigate your risk of loss with skill, but it’s never 100% controllable, and that should be acknowledged with more weight in my opinion.

I think that is exactly the article’s point: even with perfect play, you can lose hands or even tournaments. But over time, it is a statistical inevitability that you will win on average.

That is an important life lesson! If you’re doing a startup, you might execute perfectly and just hit a run of bad luck and have to give up on that idea. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try again!

Most of the human condition has an element of chance to it. Games like chess are extremely unusual in that respect.

I would say there is no equivalent of the patriots as there are far fewer teams in the NFL, a more suitable comparison would be comparing the tournament-style WSOP to PGA(golf) majors, where in the past 3 years (11 majors) there have been 10 unique champions. Almost all sports games have some element of chance where the better team does not always win, the NCAA basketball tournament is another good example of this, No one is going to win every single game every single time.

>no equivalent of the patriots in professional poker

Daniel Negreanu?

Who?

I'm being flippant here for a reason. I don't care at all about football, and can't remember the last time I've even seen the Super Bowl (or even have notice who was playing). My eyes glaze over if I'm with friends and they start talking about football. But I've heard of the Patriots. Hell, I even know the name of their head coach.

I'm an on-and-off recreational home/casino poker player, but I've never heard of Daniel Negreanu. Professional poker just hasn't achieved popular culture penetration to the degree that football has.

It wouldn't take following poker much to learn who he is. Poker doesn't have regional teams or Superfans like football, but it definitely has stars. Just because you don't know who they are doesn't mean they aren't.

I couldn't name anyone on the Patriots, and I can definitely name more poker pros than I can football players. Doesn't mean anything.

The reason there’s no equivalent to an NFL team in poker is that an NFL team plays 19 games a year and there are only a couple dozen competing at all.

If the world of professional poker only involved a couple dozen players and they only played 19 hands a year, you would absolutely see dynasties and near-perfect “seasons”.

> My point is more so that poker should not be treated as if all the skill in the world can account for all the bad luck in the world.

I don't think anyone is arguing that?

But regardless, in poker you can still win money even if you have bad luck and draw bad cards every single hand. Just as you can still lose money even if you have great luck and draw great cards every single hand.

I think the point is that yes, there is an element of chance, but there's an element of skill beyond just memorizing odds and probabilities. Most people probably do have a better chance of winning more money if they are lucky and end up with better cards more of the time, but that's not always a reliable predictor of success.

Poker is nowhere near as deep as chess, but it's deeper than you're making it sound. It's not just about reading people, especially for Texas Hold'em. Knowing probabilities and how many outs for both your pocket and flop, turn and river, taking your betting order/big and small blinds/your remaining chip stack/whether someone raised for whether you should enter the hand or not, knowing when to fold, etc.

All of that can be done without reading people at all. In fact in online poker, there's not much reading of your opponent you can do usually, just judging based on their previous actions.

I wouldn’t really say that’s a fair assessment either. I don’t think it’s in any way clear that Chess is deeper than Poker, or even by what metric you would determine such a thing.

Certainly in both games there are no competitors, human or robot, that has solved the game.

> just judging based on their previous actions.

That's reading.

I play poker and I used to play chess. Explaining the rules, tactics and strategies of poker is a lot easier than chess. It is also more exciting (subjective opinion rather than a statement of absolute truth).

The various strategies of poker (including playing ‘hail Mary’ hands, I’m sick of you bluffing hands and more) versus the play-book of chess (opening moves determine much).

A single mistake in chess can be irredeemable. In poker (unless you go all-in) a misstep can be rectified.

Chess has an elitist/bookish stigma. Poker is for beers, snacks and a game on the TV

> But it’s a game of chance.

I mean... no, it's not? Certainly there are elements of chance, but there are elements of chance in playing soccer or basketball, too, as well as Catan or Monopoly. But I wouldn't call those "games of chance".

I would define "a game of chance" as something where the outcomes solely depend on you betting on the result of a random process. Games like blackjack and craps are like that: even if you learn all the odds on everything and play "perfectly", your outcomes are still fully dependent on the randomness of the shuffle or the dice roll.

Poker is not like that at all. Yes, your outcomes are in part defined by the shuffle of the cards, but you are not playing against the deck or the dealer; you are playing against the rest of the players at the table. You can win with the worst hand if you make the other players believe your hand is better than it is. You can lose with the best hand if another player makes you believe their hand is better. That's just not possible with games like blackjack or poker. Either your cards are better than the dealer's, or vice versa; that's it. Either the dice roll matches with bets you've made, or not, or the shooter craps out. There's no ambiguity there, and you can learn the odds of winning or losing each particular bet that you can make.

(Just a note that you can also learn the odds of having the best or worst hand in poker based on your initial cards, and then update those odds as more cards appear. But in the case of poker, having the best or worst hand is not the same as winning or losing.)

> But it’s a game of chance.

This is fundamentally incorrect. Knowing when to fold is absolutely integral to being good at Poker (assuming tournament/competitive play). In some cases, you might be absolutely screwed by bad luck (like you can be in football if you tear your ACL), but Poker is not a game of luck. It's a game of probabilities and social engineering.

There's an easy way to distinguish "game of skill" from "game of chance" - just ask yourself: "Is there a World Championship for that game?"

Championships are organized only for games of skill, where you can have at least some chance of predicting the game outcome, make spectators care about this or that player. No one in their right mind would organize the championship in coin flip, or in MegaMillions lottery, because those game are pure chance, you can play them for decades and your chance of winning will be no better than that of a beginner. It would be hard to promote someone as "MegaMillions champion".

I doubt it's very important, but you've got this pretty wrong.

Poker isn't a game of chance. It's a game of skill with an element of chance.

Kinda like life.

You can tell poker isn't a game of chance, because you consistently see the same handful of faces at/near the final table for the world series of poker out of a field of many thousands.

You don't see that happen on other games of chance, only games of skill. For example, there has never been a repeat winner at the Rock-Paper-Scissors world championship.

There are no roulette professionals but there are poker professionals (some making millions).

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