Poker is a game of skill or luck




















As you already know, starting with a premium hand gives you an edge over your opponent. Most sharks understand that their overall success depends on a fish winning the odd hand. This is terrible news for the superior players who need to play against less skillful guys to win more.

In the end, the skill will always trump luck. An average player may dominate a better player on the night, but the better player will have the last laugh in the long run. This gives poker the right balance. It gives the up and coming guys a chance to dream , while the established pro gets to profit from their superior skills.

The better players have learned to accept that they can have bad days. As much as poker is a game of skill, we can all agree that the element of luck cannot be overlooked. The trick to poker is mastering the luck. You no doubt, have had, and your share of bad beats. Keep reading to find out how you can improve your luck at the next poker game you play. In poker, getting dealt a good hand might be what helps you knock out your opponents from the hand and win. It could be noticing a stray tell or being assigned to an easy table.

This is the luck factor. You may have had a series of lucky breaks or heard players talk about needing to hit a lucky streak to get back to even. The truth is, poker luck has more to do with variance than any mystical force. Variance is the tendency for mathematically predicted results to deviate from the average or normal. This means that in the short term, how far the mathematically predicted results are altered from the actual odds is variance determined.

Once you understand the concept of variance , you can stop playing based on your emotions and make sound decisions. What you should keep in mind is, getting lucky at poker is simply about making the right decisions. Skilled players seem to be luckier than most amateur players. This is why it is essential you spend time learning the skill of poker. The combination of skill and luck will make you a winning player.

It will also help you manage your bankroll so that you can keep playing. Reading poker books and joining forums where you can find useful information are some of the ways you can improve your skill. Some of the best poker players today spent quality time studying books and gaining other useful information to help improve their game.

They still do. Learning and practicing what you have learned is essential to keep improving. Also, having a personal coach is recommended if you want to improve in the shortest time frame. Poker coaches are experienced and can help improve your game by identifying your weaknesses and addressing them. I have spent thousands of dollars for hiring poker coaches. Some have been worth their money while with others I felt like I have thrown money out of the window. It is true, getting a poker coach might not be worth it for everyone , but if you do proper research, then you will get great value out of hiring one.

Read the article and you will avoid mistakes I did, so you can find yourself a great coach, well worth the money. Sometimes, you need to go low to go higher.

Find tables where you are better than most of the players. You will definitely see an increase in your short term luck if you play at soft tables. You might want to lay off playing at a table with equally skilled or better players for a while to improve your winnings. Finding soft players may be a little difficult, but knowing where to look will help. Search for poker sites with beginners on the tables or play live with unskilled players, you know. You can play at smaller poker sites since they attract fewer professional players.

Most people quit poker because they think they had a series of bad beats. Only people who keep playing get better at it and increase their short term luck. Of course, every poker player has their bad beats stories, including the pro player.

Well, it really isn't that complicated at all. Winning at poker is simply the consistent application of the following rule: Get more money in the pot when you are at a statistical advantage and put less money in the pot when you are at a statistical disadvantage. Bluffing is the other key aspect of the skill edge in poker. By being able to read your opponent and know when they are weak, you can get them to fold a better hand and therefore win more than your fair share of pots. Poker is an easy game on paper Now all of this probably sounds pretty easy in theory.

However, the biggest problem that most poker players face though is dealing with losses when the math was in their favor.

For instance, let's say you entered a poker tournament and played patiently for several hours. You eventually got all of the money in the middle before the flop with AA versus somebody else's QQ.

This is because the math plays itself out and luck no longer plays a significant role at all. So it is important that you are ready for the short term variance in poker. But if you are able to see the proverbial forrest through the trees, then you will be just fine. Final Thoughts Nobody ever said poker was going to be easy. In fact it is one of the hardest games on earth to deal with at times and that is why so few are successful at it over the long run.

And this is the way that it has to be. Somebody has to be losing in order for you to win after the house takes it's cut. And these are all of the people who end up in the red over the long run either because they got outplayed or because the game was too much for them to handle mentally.

But this doesn't change the simple mathematical fact that poker is a game of skill and not luck in the long run. Then, I went into an online poker room, and all of that theory got completely blown away. Another problem was that poker is rarely ever played as a short-term game. To do this, it spent two months playing through a billion billion hands, and built up a monstrous, terabyte database of every possible combination of hands, plays and outcomes. You can try your chances against the program, called Cepheus, here.

And while it is being lauded as a huge step in our knowledge of artificial intelligence, there are potential legal and mental health implications here too. Cepheus arguably reopens the old debate about whether the game should be classified as one of skill, or one of chance.

The worry, then, is that conclusively classifying poker as a game of skill might open the floodgates for commercial operators. Not a problem in itself, but definitely an issue when it comes to concerns about the devastating effects gambling addiction can have. A version of this post originally appeared here at Scilogs. This article is more than 7 years old.



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