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Reflections on Luck and Skill from the Part Time Poker Grind

103 points by jjxw 2y ago

RyanAdamas 2y ago
Wasn't if Phil who said something to the effect of, "If it wasn't for luck, I'd win every hand!" Which seems pretty much the thesis of this writing (though without the arrogance); ultimately resolving in, process as a better indicator of skill than results, and the best deduction of process in luck skewed results is consistency over time which essentially requires more data to deduce.
- stevenwoo 2y ago
  For what it's worth, people have studied what appears to be subject to a lot of random chance to me, a non expert - fantasy sports, and found skill plays a significant role and this study references poker studies if you have more interest. https://epubs.siam.org/doi/abs/10.1137/16M1102094 https://epubs.siam.org/doi/abs/10.1137/16M1102094
sdenton4 2y ago
For things which have some combination of luck and skill, there tends to be a baseline skill for, average results given no/low skill. So in a thousand person event, you'll have some number of people performing at baseline and a smaller collection that have actually shown up with some skill. Depending on how high the skill floor is and how much variance there is, this often means people performing at baseline don't have any real chance of winning. But! The variance still matters a lot for the skillful players: their chance of winning is 1/10 instead of 1/1000, and for the baseline folks the chance of winning is basically zero.
- jonahx 2y ago
  I know you were probably putting those numbers in as placeholders to illustrate the concept, but worth pointing out the advantage that (even a lot of) skill gives is nowhere close to 100x over weaker players.
  - csa 2y ago
    > but worth pointing out the advantage that (even a lot of) skill gives is nowhere close to 100x over weaker players. Not op, but I think you’re right… it’s probably 1000x or infinity depending on how you look at it. The ev of the median player in a typical tournament is negative, while the pro is positive. As a measure of skill, that metric can’t really be expressed as a multiple. As for skill level, I think a prob being 100x a rec is probably about right — most people have no idea how much better pros are than they are. That said, poker sustains interest from recs precisely because the format leans more towards the luck side of the luck-skill continuum than complete information games like chess or go. So a rec can play head up against a top pro like Phil Ivey and can still win, but that victory would be a function of luck rather than skill. Iterate that spot 100x or 1000x, and the rec doesn’t win very often.
    - jonahx 2y ago
      > So a rec can play head up against a top pro like Phil Ivey and can still win, but that victory would be a function of luck rather than skill. Iterate that spot 100x or 1000x, and the rec doesn’t win very often. The variance in poker is extremely high, allowing long-term losing players to often have winning sessions in cash games, and to (often enough) cash and even win tournaments. After the entry ticket is purchased (ie, not subtracting it's cost in your EV calculation), the long-term losing rec still has positive expectation in a tournament. So does the pro. EV_pro <<< 100 * EV_rec. This will be true even if the pro is Phil Ivey. Any professional poker player would much, much rather take, say, 50% of the combined winnings of 100 random recs in the WSOP main event than 50% of Ivey, assuming both were offered at the same price.
      - csa 2y ago
        > After the entry ticket is purchased (ie, not subtracting its cost in your EV calculation), the long-term losing rec still has positive expectation in a tournament. So does the pro. EV_pro <<< 100 * EV_rec. ROI is a standard metric for measuring MTT success. Pros are typically positive, recs are typically negative. Flipping the metric to EV after buy in strikes me as a straw man, but I will roll with it… I am fairly certain that I would take action on the results of a basket of 100 mtt pros being 100x greater than the results of a basket of 100 mtt recs in the wsop ME. Like I said, I’m pretty sure that would be closer to 1000x, since the vast majority of the recs will not cash, while the pros are much more likely to cash and run deep. I think this is a decent proxy for roi. If you’re interested, I will be happy to negotiate terms and have a mutually agreed upon escrow-holder for a bet next year. I agree with your comment that there is a lot of variance in poker, but that variance can be mitigated quite a bit via skill except in “short stack” MTTs that devolve into shovefests relatively early.
brigadier132 2y ago
This is why, for earning money, you should participate in positive sum games like the real economy. Poker is worse than 0 sum, its negative sum.
- snikeris 2y ago
  Perhaps in a casino taking a rake. But if you're playing w/ friends? The good times make it positive sum. Even in a casino, the players can be getting enough utility / enjoyment out of the game that it's positive sum.
  - brigadier132 2y ago
    Yes you are right but “pros” are playing with rake typically. In a way you can consider poker 0 sum or positive sum depending on the utility you derive from the enjoyment of gambling. But that should also factor in the negative utility from gamblers that lose
  - fartsucker69 2y ago
    the sum here is the sum of wins or losses across all players. for you to win, someone else has to lose. in an economy everyone can be a winner.
- _gmax0 2y ago
  Care to elaborate on how the real economy is positive sum and poker is negative sum?
  - brigadier132 2y ago
    Poker has a rake and the amount of wealth in the system is the money people put on the table (not even factoring in that gambling winnings are taxed). Meaning the total wealth decreases for every hand played in a raked game. Economic transactions and increasing efficiency are positive sum. You can combine pieces of metal into new alloys and machinery which are more valuable than the sum of their parts. This is positive sum. If two people trade they only engage in trade if the transaction is mutually beneficial.
ryandrake 2y ago
His section on volume rings pretty true. I used to play a lot recreationally. And by "a lot" I mean probably on the medium-to-high side of recreational, but not even close to pro. Like attending every major regional event and attending WSOP every year for 10 years. Both cash and tournaments. I've stopped because of how much of a tiring grind poker is, and how much time you have to dedicate in order to make it financially rewarding. You need to play -a lot- to get good, and then you need to play a lot as a good player to make money. It is really a lot of work. If you are not a winning poker player (in other words, your long term EV at the table is negative), you're just going to lose money on average, so playing more means losing more. It only makes sense to play in that case if you actually enjoy playing the game and treat your losses as the cost of entertainment. But if you are a winning poker player, you still won't win enough to rely on the income unless you are playing A LOT. And by a lot I mean every day, for hours a day. And even more if you play online because the level of play is so much stronger online than live. And then, even if you are a winning player, and you play a lot, AND you have enough average cash flow to make it worth it, you are still going to have periods where variance wipes you out and you're down for months straight. It's pretty brutal. After all this time, I decided I'd rather get a different hobby than spending so much of my time grinding away in a smoky casino. I just play (infrequent) home games now.
- ProjectArcturis 2y ago
  It's the hardest way to make an easy living.
- keyle 2y ago
  Thanks for your candid report. Not enough people tell it how it is, and everyone thinks they're special. Fact is, a lot of top players also have deals on the side, with brands and ambassador things. I feel you need those deals to make up for the bad runs. I love the game, but the variance can inflate egos and the grind makes other hobbies more attractive.
  - ryandrake 2y ago
    > Thanks for your candid report. Not enough people tell it how it is, and everyone thinks they're special. That's a good point, too, one I failed to mention. A lot of people are losing poker players, but they don't know it. They don't keep records, and they don't manage and analyze their bankroll over time. A losing poker player has a negative EV. If you buy in to 20 $1000 tournaments, bink one of them for $15K, you're on top of the world, but guess what, you're a losing poker player. Cash players are even worse. They donk off $500 a night but only remember that time last week when they were up $5000 and cashed out. Congratulations, but your EV is still negative. By my own measure, I was a losing poker player for most of my years playing the game, and I have a spreadsheet to prove it.
saucymew 2y ago
"Poker is a combination of luck and skill. People think mastering the skill is hard, but they're wrong. The trick to poker is mastering the luck. That's philosophy. Understanding luck is philosophy, and there are some people who aren't ever gonna fade it. That's what sets poker apart. And that's what keeps everyone coming back for more." -- Shut Up & Deal
- trhway 2y ago
  >Poker is a combination of luck and skill Luck follows (or at least positively correlates) with skill :) 30+ years ago in our company of friends in the university dormitories we had a guy who had the card deck handling skills of a major illusionist (and those skills were naturally a source of significant income for him). The guy was also tremendously lucky - well beside mere being alive and without broken bones while applying his skills for income :) - in particular once he won an amount enough to buy 1-bdrm apt in St.Petersburg back then on a scratch lottery ticket that he bought at a random place on our way while we were walking to some business meeting in a city that we just arrived that morning. If it were a skillful illusion, then it was way beyond anything i've heard or seen before :)
  - interroboink 2y ago
    I'm not sure I follow... You feel that his skills as an illusionist somehow helped him win on that scratch lottery ticket?
    - eschneider 2y ago
      I used to be the absolute BEST at scratch lottery tickets. OTOH, "every ticket a winner" used to be a thing, and I had free access to an MRI machine at the time. Sometimes, you make your own luck...
      - WalterBright 2y ago
        I thought the people that administer the lottery keep track of the winners, and investigate any statistically anomalous winners.
annacappa 2y ago
The reason poker is a successful game is because bad players can win. Otherwise why would a person who was bad at the game stake any money at all. Personally I would rather take the luck out of it and attempt to normalize (perhaps by playing duplicate hands) but I imagine it would be quite boring for non poker nerds and therefore non lucrative for everyone.
- cortesoft 2y ago
  > Personally I would rather take the luck out of it Then you should play Chess, or some other perfect information game. There are popular games that don't involve luck.
  - annacappa 2y ago
    I do and I play duplicate bridge, a game that has taken the luck out of a card game. I just like poker theory - I ran a bot for years - and I just don’t like variance that much and I guess I like the game for the strategy more than who has the most chips at the end, although obviously without the hazard it’s not anywhere as entertaining
    - MaxfordAndSons 2y ago
      Curious what do you mean by "I ran a bot"? Like, you programmed and/or operated a bot that played on real money sites?
      - annacappa 2y ago
        I programmed and ran a bot that played on real money sites.
        MaxfordAndSons 2y ago
        Oh, so you cheated people out of their money. That's not cool.
pbj1968 2y ago
[flagged]
- bsder 2y ago
  This article is quite nice in pointing out that even if you are good, you still have a 33% chance of losing money long term. I don't think any other article has really mentioned that.
  - nhggfu 2y ago
    not what the article points out.
interroboink 2y ago
This is an important topic to me, and I'm glad to see one of the "winners" state plainly how much luck is involved in poker, and by analogy, many other areas of life. I'd love to see articles like this written by someone who did not win, too. It's too bad that people pay less attention to those stories, as he mentioned in the article (c.f. clickbaity title). At least this is a winner admitting the importance of luck, rather than just saying "do what I did, and you can win too!" [1] I'm surprised there was no mention of modern machine learning "solvers" for poker, which can get very close to perfect play. The game is not truly solved in the game-theoretic sense, but so close as to make very little difference, as I understand it. Some professional players do strange things like look at the second hand of their watch, as a source of randomness as input to their decision making, since ideal play requires some true randomness in your actions.[2] So, in addition to the "results-based vs. process-based" angles presented in the article, I'd say there's also a "mathematics-based" consideration. At least for poker, where all the rules are perfectly clear. Harder to apply that to real-life poker-esque situations like founding startups, of course. [1] As always, relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1827/ https://xkcd.com/1827/ [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/18/magazine/ai-technology-poker.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/18/magazine/ai-technology-po... — NYT "How A.I. Conquered Poker" (alt link: https://archive.is/QbXXE https://archive.is/QbXXE)
- WalterBright 2y ago
  > admitting the importance of luck Poker is a mathematical game with mathematically fixed odds. Real life is different in that there is a considerable amount of room to tilt the odds in one's favor. For an obvious way to tilt odds in your favor, stay in school and learn what you're being taught.
  - dambi0 2y ago
    What courses / subjects would you recommend?
    - WalterBright 2y ago
      The skills that pay the most are skills that rely on solid math skills. At Caltech, 9 out of 10 classes were thin veneers over math classes. Being comfortable with math will pay off for you for the rest of your life.
adfjalkfja 2y ago
online is getting pretty dicey these days sadly
- fred_is_fred 2y ago
  Are there specific instances or issues? I am curious if you mean cheating, collusion, fraud, etc...
  - iJohnDoe 2y ago
    > you mean cheating, collusion, fraud Yes, all of those things. There are teams at the same table all working together by communicating with each other about what hands they have. The sucker at the table is the one not part of that team. Also, it’s software, which means it can be written to favor the house. Online gambling for real money is the equivalent of just setting your money on fire.
    - piltdownman 2y ago
      "Online gambling for real money is the equivalent of just setting your money on fire." Citation/Any evidence would be great, but I won't hold my breath.
      - jajko 2y ago
        "Any gambling for real money is the equivalent of just setting your money on fire". (c) by Jajko, 23/07/2024 It doesn't require advanced studies to realize this, just learn from mistakes of others. Even if 1 in 1000 wins (for now), its a losing game for any honest folks. Scammers prey on simple and powerful addiction and little else, games can be easily rigged in ways you will never realize just as parent describes.
        badpun 2y ago
        My friend is an honest poker pro who's been making a living from playing online since 2008 or so. He may be "1 in 1000", but that's because online game is tough, not because it's rigged.
woah 2y ago
> Once you have identified an activity as being more luck than skill driven, a person’s process for the activity starts to become a much stronger signal for whether or not they are actually any good. This is the central point of the article, and I don't think it's true. If it were as easy as "following a good process", then anyone could get rich investing.
- jjxw 2y ago
  This is a point worth clarifying. I think a lot of people actually do get rich investing. It just turns out the "good process" in this case is leaving your money in a diversified portfolio for decades. This leverages making a bunch of bets that on average have a positive expected value over a long enough time horizon that you are able to realize the gains. There are also certainly other ways to have an edge in investing (quant firms come to mind), but I think the most realistic option for "anyone" is readily available in the form of low fee index funds and a long time horizon.
  - afc 2y ago
    > I think a lot of people actually do get rich investing. https://youtu.be/H5jPJQ5cVGU?si=KoXd4H3FOkLZ1y06 https://youtu.be/H5jPJQ5cVGU?si=KoXd4H3FOkLZ1y06 has an interesting counter-point. You need to fuel your returns with savings. I guess it's a subtlety — in the end, since you said "for decades", and if you adjusted your wording sightly (such as "help you reach your financial goals", instead of "get rich"), the underlying message is similar. But I figured I'd share the link in case you find it interesting.
    - jjxw 2y ago
      Yeah, agreed, love the Plain Bagel and the generally sane takes from that channel. "Get rich" is definitely too broad of a target and probably has too many connotations with "mansion and luxury cars" when, as you identified, what I meant with that statement is closer to "financial goals" or, more tangibly, something like "comfortable retirement".
- yuliyp 2y ago
jmpman 2y ago
I regularly play in Vegas poker no limit hold’em tournaments, and am substantially positive. These are 12+ hour/day, multi day tournaments, and a bad player with luck just isn’t going to last the grind. 90% of the people in these tournaments have no reason being there. The top 10% are solid, and within that group, it does come down to luck.
- markus_zhang 2y ago
  I think that 90% of the people have no reason being there is the sweet point? But this is tournament so you have to be in the first X to win some return, right? I'm not a professional player but I have observed in more than a trivial amount of occurences there are sharks in casinos picking the right cash table to maximize returns. They seem to know each other and don't play against each other, but always try to pick a table of fishes. I don't know if I'm thinking too much though.
  - creer 2y ago
    Isn't that a legitimate part of learning professional poker? To measure how much you play against (now) known strong players?
nhggfu 2y ago
decent post. i used to play tournaments 12-14 hours a day back in the glory days. most important things for me as a MTT (multi table tournament) grinder were discipline, game selection, bankroll management, good note taking, study, volume. these days i chuckle at how some people are selling 70% of their MTT action at 1.3 markup - thus freerolling. a nice variance killer if you can get away with it / justify it. grinding life > grinding poker, imo.
canistel 2y ago
1. This has many parallels with the concept of Resulting - our tendency to equate the quality of a decision with the quality of its outcome, which was conceptualised in the book Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke, which although a great work, I have to admit I did not finish. 2. Even though the element of chance is inherent to Bridge too, Duplicate Bridge is a clever attempt to nullify the role of luck in tournaments. The same hand is played in different tables (by different teams), and points are scored depending on how you fared in comparison to the other table. So, rather than playing to win, you play to do better than your counterpart in the other table. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duplicate_bridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duplicate_bridge
JohnMakin 2y ago
I have played a mix of professionally, casually, and semi-professionally for the last ~20 years, in a broad mix of games and formats - while his points on volume are definitely true and not a new concept, the determination I've also come to over the years playing 10k+ tournaments and probably ~1k of those being live - you will never see the long run in the large multi-table format. I have seen horrific losing streaks, insane winning streaks, and soul crushing break even stretches of years with players that are much, much stronger than I am. Most of my big tournament cashes have come down to a few coin flips, any one of them losing would have resulted in a bust. Smaller tournaments and cash games have much smaller variance and are what I would recommend for anyone trying to make a living for poker - large multi-table tournaments are moonshots and should be treated as such. His points about staking are valid in terms of "diversification" for a poker pro, but TBH, the staking scene is almost uniformly full of degenerates (on the stakee side) and predators (on the staker side). The fundamental problem is that the venn diagram of a winning/good player but also needs a piece of his action bought tends to be an inherently unreliable set of people.

103 points by jjxw 2y ago

Wasn't if Phil who said something to the effect of, "If it wasn't for luck, I'd win every hand!" Which seems pretty much the thesis of this writing (though without the arrogance); ultimately resolving in, process as a better indicator of skill than results, and the best deduction of process in luck skewed results is consistency over time which essentially requires more data to deduce.

stevenwoo 2y ago
For what it's worth, people have studied what appears to be subject to a lot of random chance to me, a non expert - fantasy sports, and found skill plays a significant role and this study references poker studies if you have more interest. https://epubs.siam.org/doi/abs/10.1137/16M1102094 https://epubs.siam.org/doi/abs/10.1137/16M1102094

sdenton4 2y ago

For things which have some combination of luck and skill, there tends to be a baseline skill for, average results given no/low skill. So in a thousand person event, you'll have some number of people performing at baseline and a smaller collection that have actually shown up with some skill. Depending on how high the skill floor is and how much variance there is, this often means people performing at baseline don't have any real chance of winning. But! The variance still matters a lot for the skillful players: their chance of winning is 1/10 instead of 1/1000, and for the baseline folks the chance of winning is basically zero.

jonahx 2y ago
I know you were probably putting those numbers in as placeholders to illustrate the concept, but worth pointing out the advantage that (even a lot of) skill gives is nowhere close to 100x over weaker players.
- csa 2y ago
  > but worth pointing out the advantage that (even a lot of) skill gives is nowhere close to 100x over weaker players. Not op, but I think you’re right… it’s probably 1000x or infinity depending on how you look at it. The ev of the median player in a typical tournament is negative, while the pro is positive. As a measure of skill, that metric can’t really be expressed as a multiple. As for skill level, I think a prob being 100x a rec is probably about right — most people have no idea how much better pros are than they are. That said, poker sustains interest from recs precisely because the format leans more towards the luck side of the luck-skill continuum than complete information games like chess or go. So a rec can play head up against a top pro like Phil Ivey and can still win, but that victory would be a function of luck rather than skill. Iterate that spot 100x or 1000x, and the rec doesn’t win very often.
  - jonahx 2y ago
    > So a rec can play head up against a top pro like Phil Ivey and can still win, but that victory would be a function of luck rather than skill. Iterate that spot 100x or 1000x, and the rec doesn’t win very often. The variance in poker is extremely high, allowing long-term losing players to often have winning sessions in cash games, and to (often enough) cash and even win tournaments. After the entry ticket is purchased (ie, not subtracting it's cost in your EV calculation), the long-term losing rec still has positive expectation in a tournament. So does the pro. EV_pro <<< 100 * EV_rec. This will be true even if the pro is Phil Ivey. Any professional poker player would much, much rather take, say, 50% of the combined winnings of 100 random recs in the WSOP main event than 50% of Ivey, assuming both were offered at the same price.
    - csa 2y ago
      > After the entry ticket is purchased (ie, not subtracting its cost in your EV calculation), the long-term losing rec still has positive expectation in a tournament. So does the pro. EV_pro <<< 100 * EV_rec. ROI is a standard metric for measuring MTT success. Pros are typically positive, recs are typically negative. Flipping the metric to EV after buy in strikes me as a straw man, but I will roll with it… I am fairly certain that I would take action on the results of a basket of 100 mtt pros being 100x greater than the results of a basket of 100 mtt recs in the wsop ME. Like I said, I’m pretty sure that would be closer to 1000x, since the vast majority of the recs will not cash, while the pros are much more likely to cash and run deep. I think this is a decent proxy for roi. If you’re interested, I will be happy to negotiate terms and have a mutually agreed upon escrow-holder for a bet next year. I agree with your comment that there is a lot of variance in poker, but that variance can be mitigated quite a bit via skill except in “short stack” MTTs that devolve into shovefests relatively early.

brigadier132 2y ago

This is why, for earning money, you should participate in positive sum games like the real economy. Poker is worse than 0 sum, its negative sum.

snikeris 2y ago
Perhaps in a casino taking a rake. But if you're playing w/ friends? The good times make it positive sum. Even in a casino, the players can be getting enough utility / enjoyment out of the game that it's positive sum.
- brigadier132 2y ago
  Yes you are right but “pros” are playing with rake typically. In a way you can consider poker 0 sum or positive sum depending on the utility you derive from the enjoyment of gambling. But that should also factor in the negative utility from gamblers that lose
- fartsucker69 2y ago
  the sum here is the sum of wins or losses across all players. for you to win, someone else has to lose. in an economy everyone can be a winner.
_gmax0 2y ago
Care to elaborate on how the real economy is positive sum and poker is negative sum?
- brigadier132 2y ago
  Poker has a rake and the amount of wealth in the system is the money people put on the table (not even factoring in that gambling winnings are taxed). Meaning the total wealth decreases for every hand played in a raked game. Economic transactions and increasing efficiency are positive sum. You can combine pieces of metal into new alloys and machinery which are more valuable than the sum of their parts. This is positive sum. If two people trade they only engage in trade if the transaction is mutually beneficial.

ryandrake 2y ago

His section on volume rings pretty true. I used to play a lot recreationally. And by "a lot" I mean probably on the medium-to-high side of recreational, but not even close to pro. Like attending every major regional event and attending WSOP every year for 10 years. Both cash and tournaments. I've stopped because of how much of a tiring grind poker is, and how much time you have to dedicate in order to make it financially rewarding. You need to play -a lot- to get good, and then you need to play a lot as a good player to make money. It is really a lot of work. If you are not a winning poker player (in other words, your long term EV at the table is negative), you're just going to lose money on average, so playing more means losing more. It only makes sense to play in that case if you actually enjoy playing the game and treat your losses as the cost of entertainment. But if you are a winning poker player, you still won't win enough to rely on the income unless you are playing A LOT. And by a lot I mean every day, for hours a day. And even more if you play online because the level of play is so much stronger online than live. And then, even if you are a winning player, and you play a lot, AND you have enough average cash flow to make it worth it, you are still going to have periods where variance wipes you out and you're down for months straight. It's pretty brutal. After all this time, I decided I'd rather get a different hobby than spending so much of my time grinding away in a smoky casino. I just play (infrequent) home games now.

ProjectArcturis 2y ago
It's the hardest way to make an easy living.
keyle 2y ago
Thanks for your candid report. Not enough people tell it how it is, and everyone thinks they're special. Fact is, a lot of top players also have deals on the side, with brands and ambassador things. I feel you need those deals to make up for the bad runs. I love the game, but the variance can inflate egos and the grind makes other hobbies more attractive.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  > Thanks for your candid report. Not enough people tell it how it is, and everyone thinks they're special. That's a good point, too, one I failed to mention. A lot of people are losing poker players, but they don't know it. They don't keep records, and they don't manage and analyze their bankroll over time. A losing poker player has a negative EV. If you buy in to 20 $1000 tournaments, bink one of them for $15K, you're on top of the world, but guess what, you're a losing poker player. Cash players are even worse. They donk off $500 a night but only remember that time last week when they were up $5000 and cashed out. Congratulations, but your EV is still negative. By my own measure, I was a losing poker player for most of my years playing the game, and I have a spreadsheet to prove it.

saucymew 2y ago

"Poker is a combination of luck and skill. People think mastering the skill is hard, but they're wrong. The trick to poker is mastering the luck. That's philosophy. Understanding luck is philosophy, and there are some people who aren't ever gonna fade it. That's what sets poker apart. And that's what keeps everyone coming back for more." -- Shut Up & Deal

trhway 2y ago
>Poker is a combination of luck and skill Luck follows (or at least positively correlates) with skill :) 30+ years ago in our company of friends in the university dormitories we had a guy who had the card deck handling skills of a major illusionist (and those skills were naturally a source of significant income for him). The guy was also tremendously lucky - well beside mere being alive and without broken bones while applying his skills for income :) - in particular once he won an amount enough to buy 1-bdrm apt in St.Petersburg back then on a scratch lottery ticket that he bought at a random place on our way while we were walking to some business meeting in a city that we just arrived that morning. If it were a skillful illusion, then it was way beyond anything i've heard or seen before :)
- interroboink 2y ago
  I'm not sure I follow... You feel that his skills as an illusionist somehow helped him win on that scratch lottery ticket?
  - eschneider 2y ago
    I used to be the absolute BEST at scratch lottery tickets. OTOH, "every ticket a winner" used to be a thing, and I had free access to an MRI machine at the time. Sometimes, you make your own luck...
    - WalterBright 2y ago
      I thought the people that administer the lottery keep track of the winners, and investigate any statistically anomalous winners.

annacappa 2y ago

The reason poker is a successful game is because bad players can win. Otherwise why would a person who was bad at the game stake any money at all. Personally I would rather take the luck out of it and attempt to normalize (perhaps by playing duplicate hands) but I imagine it would be quite boring for non poker nerds and therefore non lucrative for everyone.

cortesoft 2y ago
> Personally I would rather take the luck out of it Then you should play Chess, or some other perfect information game. There are popular games that don't involve luck.
- annacappa 2y ago
  I do and I play duplicate bridge, a game that has taken the luck out of a card game. I just like poker theory - I ran a bot for years - and I just don’t like variance that much and I guess I like the game for the strategy more than who has the most chips at the end, although obviously without the hazard it’s not anywhere as entertaining
  - MaxfordAndSons 2y ago
    Curious what do you mean by "I ran a bot"? Like, you programmed and/or operated a bot that played on real money sites?
    - annacappa 2y ago
      I programmed and ran a bot that played on real money sites.
      - MaxfordAndSons 2y ago
        Oh, so you cheated people out of their money. That's not cool.

pbj1968 2y ago

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bsder 2y ago
This article is quite nice in pointing out that even if you are good, you still have a 33% chance of losing money long term. I don't think any other article has really mentioned that.
- nhggfu 2y ago
  not what the article points out.

interroboink 2y ago

This is an important topic to me, and I'm glad to see one of the "winners" state plainly how much luck is involved in poker, and by analogy, many other areas of life. I'd love to see articles like this written by someone who did not win, too. It's too bad that people pay less attention to those stories, as he mentioned in the article (c.f. clickbaity title). At least this is a winner admitting the importance of luck, rather than just saying "do what I did, and you can win too!" [1] I'm surprised there was no mention of modern machine learning "solvers" for poker, which can get very close to perfect play. The game is not truly solved in the game-theoretic sense, but so close as to make very little difference, as I understand it. Some professional players do strange things like look at the second hand of their watch, as a source of randomness as input to their decision making, since ideal play requires some true randomness in your actions.[2] So, in addition to the "results-based vs. process-based" angles presented in the article, I'd say there's also a "mathematics-based" consideration. At least for poker, where all the rules are perfectly clear. Harder to apply that to real-life poker-esque situations like founding startups, of course. [1] As always, relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1827/ https://xkcd.com/1827/ [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/18/magazine/ai-technology-poker.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/18/magazine/ai-technology-po... — NYT "How A.I. Conquered Poker" (alt link: https://archive.is/QbXXE https://archive.is/QbXXE)

WalterBright 2y ago
> admitting the importance of luck Poker is a mathematical game with mathematically fixed odds. Real life is different in that there is a considerable amount of room to tilt the odds in one's favor. For an obvious way to tilt odds in your favor, stay in school and learn what you're being taught.
- dambi0 2y ago
  What courses / subjects would you recommend?
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    The skills that pay the most are skills that rely on solid math skills. At Caltech, 9 out of 10 classes were thin veneers over math classes. Being comfortable with math will pay off for you for the rest of your life.

adfjalkfja 2y ago

online is getting pretty dicey these days sadly

fred_is_fred 2y ago
Are there specific instances or issues? I am curious if you mean cheating, collusion, fraud, etc...
- iJohnDoe 2y ago
  > you mean cheating, collusion, fraud Yes, all of those things. There are teams at the same table all working together by communicating with each other about what hands they have. The sucker at the table is the one not part of that team. Also, it’s software, which means it can be written to favor the house. Online gambling for real money is the equivalent of just setting your money on fire.
  - piltdownman 2y ago
    "Online gambling for real money is the equivalent of just setting your money on fire." Citation/Any evidence would be great, but I won't hold my breath.
    - jajko 2y ago
      "Any gambling for real money is the equivalent of just setting your money on fire". (c) by Jajko, 23/07/2024 It doesn't require advanced studies to realize this, just learn from mistakes of others. Even if 1 in 1000 wins (for now), its a losing game for any honest folks. Scammers prey on simple and powerful addiction and little else, games can be easily rigged in ways you will never realize just as parent describes.
      - badpun 2y ago
        My friend is an honest poker pro who's been making a living from playing online since 2008 or so. He may be "1 in 1000", but that's because online game is tough, not because it's rigged.

woah 2y ago

> Once you have identified an activity as being more luck than skill driven, a person’s process for the activity starts to become a much stronger signal for whether or not they are actually any good. This is the central point of the article, and I don't think it's true. If it were as easy as "following a good process", then anyone could get rich investing.

jjxw 2y ago
This is a point worth clarifying. I think a lot of people actually do get rich investing. It just turns out the "good process" in this case is leaving your money in a diversified portfolio for decades. This leverages making a bunch of bets that on average have a positive expected value over a long enough time horizon that you are able to realize the gains. There are also certainly other ways to have an edge in investing (quant firms come to mind), but I think the most realistic option for "anyone" is readily available in the form of low fee index funds and a long time horizon.
- afc 2y ago
  > I think a lot of people actually do get rich investing. https://youtu.be/H5jPJQ5cVGU?si=KoXd4H3FOkLZ1y06 https://youtu.be/H5jPJQ5cVGU?si=KoXd4H3FOkLZ1y06 has an interesting counter-point. You need to fuel your returns with savings. I guess it's a subtlety — in the end, since you said "for decades", and if you adjusted your wording sightly (such as "help you reach your financial goals", instead of "get rich"), the underlying message is similar. But I figured I'd share the link in case you find it interesting.
  - jjxw 2y ago
    Yeah, agreed, love the Plain Bagel and the generally sane takes from that channel. "Get rich" is definitely too broad of a target and probably has too many connotations with "mansion and luxury cars" when, as you identified, what I meant with that statement is closer to "financial goals" or, more tangibly, something like "comfortable retirement".
yuliyp 2y ago

jmpman 2y ago

I regularly play in Vegas poker no limit hold’em tournaments, and am substantially positive. These are 12+ hour/day, multi day tournaments, and a bad player with luck just isn’t going to last the grind. 90% of the people in these tournaments have no reason being there. The top 10% are solid, and within that group, it does come down to luck.

markus_zhang 2y ago
I think that 90% of the people have no reason being there is the sweet point? But this is tournament so you have to be in the first X to win some return, right? I'm not a professional player but I have observed in more than a trivial amount of occurences there are sharks in casinos picking the right cash table to maximize returns. They seem to know each other and don't play against each other, but always try to pick a table of fishes. I don't know if I'm thinking too much though.
- creer 2y ago
  Isn't that a legitimate part of learning professional poker? To measure how much you play against (now) known strong players?

nhggfu 2y ago

decent post. i used to play tournaments 12-14 hours a day back in the glory days. most important things for me as a MTT (multi table tournament) grinder were discipline, game selection, bankroll management, good note taking, study, volume. these days i chuckle at how some people are selling 70% of their MTT action at 1.3 markup - thus freerolling. a nice variance killer if you can get away with it / justify it. grinding life > grinding poker, imo.

canistel 2y ago

1. This has many parallels with the concept of Resulting - our tendency to equate the quality of a decision with the quality of its outcome, which was conceptualised in the book Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke, which although a great work, I have to admit I did not finish. 2. Even though the element of chance is inherent to Bridge too, Duplicate Bridge is a clever attempt to nullify the role of luck in tournaments. The same hand is played in different tables (by different teams), and points are scored depending on how you fared in comparison to the other table. So, rather than playing to win, you play to do better than your counterpart in the other table. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duplicate_bridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duplicate_bridge

JohnMakin 2y ago

I have played a mix of professionally, casually, and semi-professionally for the last ~20 years, in a broad mix of games and formats - while his points on volume are definitely true and not a new concept, the determination I've also come to over the years playing 10k+ tournaments and probably ~1k of those being live - you will never see the long run in the large multi-table format. I have seen horrific losing streaks, insane winning streaks, and soul crushing break even stretches of years with players that are much, much stronger than I am. Most of my big tournament cashes have come down to a few coin flips, any one of them losing would have resulted in a bust. Smaller tournaments and cash games have much smaller variance and are what I would recommend for anyone trying to make a living for poker - large multi-table tournaments are moonshots and should be treated as such. His points about staking are valid in terms of "diversification" for a poker pro, but TBH, the staking scene is almost uniformly full of degenerates (on the stakee side) and predators (on the staker side). The fundamental problem is that the venn diagram of a winning/good player but also needs a piece of his action bought tends to be an inherently unreliable set of people.