Thoughts on Poker Luck vs Skill Part One
Thoughts on Poker Luck vs Skill part 1 By B. Butler It’s doubtless one of the oldest wiles in poker online: do people succeed because of fortune or because of ability? To one degree, it’s a completely absurd argumentobviously it requires some rank of skill in order to appreciate even the most basic concepts. But how much really is talent? A recent repot by Michael DeDonno, a PhD student at Case Western Reserve University, designs to have the answer. For his research, Michael DeDonno got together a group of 41 university students who didn’t have any acquaintance with poker. He divided them into two groups: one who did not receive any instruction, and another who got a basic layout with info on what hands were good openers and hand selection ranges, etc. These two groups both went through 200 deals of poker with results showing their outcomes in amounts of chips. As you might suppose, the players who’d been given info did better than those who hadn’t. In another connected study, DeDonno also found that players at Everest or who played fewer hands tended to do better than when they played more hands. It’s unclear what this data is supposed to prove. Yes, it makes sense that someone given a basic outlook of the game is going to do better than someone with no idea. But that’s true for anything: craps, soccer, Monopoly. If no one tells you how to play Monopoly, you’re going to get beaten more often by those who are given some tactical strategy. I really don’t see how this study proves poker’s skill, though it does prove the obvious: those who understand often do better than than those who don’t.