By
grapsfan
There was a thread a couple of weeks ago about the “luck v. skill” factor in poker: how much of the game is one versus the other? I replied that I thought in the short-term, one single hand was about 95% luck, one SNG or MTT is about 50-60% luck, and that number drops down to zero as time stretches out over years. There were two interesting concepts I took from that thread, ones that I wanted to take the time and share with you here.
The first is that several people got nit-picky over the term “luck.” There’s no such thing as “luck,” they said. It is statistical variance, the deterministic reality that in an environment with random variables, a wide range of outcomes is possible. You benefit from some outcomes, are hurt by others, and some are neutral. But there’s no such thing as “luck.” I’m willing to accept that, because we’re just dealing in semantics. “Deterministic reality blah blah blah” is what I would call “luck.” For the most part, I don’t believe in matters of spirit, faith, or the abstract world. I do not rely on talismans, lucky numbers, superstitions or karma. However, I understand statistics, probability, and randomness. I believe that people can and do go on huge rushes in craps, blackjack, and yes, poker, because the randomness blesses them with several positive outcomes in a row.
The second concept was brought up by our own Adam Small, who wondered why even bother with such a silly pursuit, asking, “how do you even attempt to quantify something like that?” Well, I’ll tell you what I did to generate some estimated numbers, and I’ll put it out there for everyone to tear apart. Having spent a lot of time going through my hand histories and those of other people, I’ve come to the realization that only about 5% of the hands in a tournament mean anything. Most of the time, you’re folding 83 from under the gun, folding Q9 to a raise, or raising with AJ from the button and picking up the blinds. In other situations, the conditions of the game force you to make a play regardless of the cards you have (you’re very short-stacked, you’re being offered the right pot odds to call an all-in with any two cards, etc.), and luck determines the outcome of the hand. In a typical online MTT of around 500 hands, only 20-30 have decisions that are critical to the end result. The other 95% are whether or not you got lucky with good cards, or good position and your opponents got unlucky with their cards. If you wait to play big pots, the percentage goes up; if you play a ton of small pots, it drops. But it’s always substantial.
Please do not discount how important that “5% skill” quotient is in each and every hand that you play. It is in that small, repeated margin in which your successes and failures as a poker player lie. Tiny profit margins, repeated over billions of transactions, created McDonald’s, Wal-Mart, and every single casino around the world. The great players are the ones with the focus to wring every bit of advantage they have out of that small percentage. In every MTT or SNG that I play or review from other players, I see lost opportunities to steal blinds, bluff re-raise, and get the most out of their holdings. This happens because they hit the “fold” advance action when they’re dealt rags, or they just get disheartened to find another 72 offsuit in front of them. They got unlucky that they didn’t have good cards, but they’re not taking advantage of the skill they may have to turn that chicken shit into chicken salad for that particular hand.
This factor multiplies into the “50-60%” luck quotient I included in one particular tournament, be it a SNG or an MTT. I tell people just starting to play multi-table tournaments that in order to win them, regardless of how well you play, you have to:
- win two coin flips for very large pots (either doubling your chips or eliminating a stack close to yours)
- win one big suckout (at least a 3:1 dog) and one smaller suckout (3:2 dog) for large pots
- get action twice when you have monster hands for large pots (someone with QQ runs into your KK, AQ into your AK, etc.), and have your monsters hold up
All of those circumstances are primarily luck-based. The distribution of cards says that you will get AA once every 221 hands. If you don’t get action when your 220:1 shot comes in, it makes it that much harder to win a tournament. Sometimes you flop top set and are fortunate enough that someone else has bottom set. Other times you flop top set and nobody else has squat, and you can’t get another chip in the middle post-flop. Sometimes you’re the AA, sometimes you’re the KK. Those are the breaks of the game.
There is tremendous room for the skilled player to be profitable, but it doesn’t happen every time. This is a good thing. Stu Ungar killed gin tournaments in the late 1970s because nobody could beat him, and people stopped putting down their entry fee to play for 2nd place. If it was painfully obvious to the 6000 of the 6600 players in the Stars Million that they were dead money, there wouldn’t be a Stars Million. The luck factor in a poker tournament makes it attractive to people of all abilities. The skill factor makes it possible to make a living at it (you don’t know any professional slot tournament players, do you?).
So, as Adam asked, why bother with this quantification, especially since there are no formulas or graphs that give a precise answer? It took me the two weeks since the thread was posted to come up with a reason, and that was what prompted me to write this column. We all grew up playing skill games where you can look back on that game and determine why we won or lost. Sports are easy to analyze that way. My Little League team won because the other team’s pitcher couldn’t throw strikes. My basketball team lost because Timmy missed two free throws. I lost my wrestling match because I suck and my opponent was stronger than me. Whatever the reason, it’s almost always concrete, and you can learn from it.
Poker is different. The study of hand histories is to maximize your 5% skill quotient on each hand, rather than the big-picture, “why did I lose the game?” On rare occasions, mistakes may directly cost you a win, but it’s usually an indirect causality. The rest of the answer to why you lost is based in luck, and that’s something you have to learn to accept. If you spend too much time looking for patterns in the chaos of luck, you will detract from your ability to maximize your skill edge. And you just may end up making yourself crazy.