This week, the PocketFives.com Podcastsponsored by Carbon Pokerwelcomes two special guests to the show. Paco Hope is the co-author of a study jointly conducted by Cigital and PokerStarsto determine to what extent skill plays a role in Texas Hold’em. Hope spent the month of December examining the results of 103 million cash game hands on the online poker site. We also welcome PocketFiver Mohsin chicagocards1Charania (pictured at right), who cracked the Top 10 of the Online Poker Rankings on April 1st (and that was no April Fools joke). It all happens this week on the PocketFives.com Podcast sponsored by Carbon Poker.

Charania’s tournament poker resume includes a third place effort in the Sunday Million in October for $84,000. One month later, he took down the $200 rebuy on PokerStars for $45,000. What have you done for me lately? How about final tables in the UltimateBetOnline Championship (UBOC) and the Full Tilt Poker Sunday Brawl on the same day in January? He also racked up $92,000 in tournaments that are tracked for the Rankings last month. On his rise up through the ranks, Charania told the PocketFives.com Podcast, “Before I was ranked, I would play a lot of cash and tournament poker. I started focusing on tournament poker and made prop bets against friends that I could be ranked. The reason that I started completely playing tournaments is because I knew there was some way to measure it, unlike cash games. I started talking to a lot of good tournament players online and it helped my game.”

Some have characterized Charania’s game as “patient.” He’s taken this approach to some of the world’s largest live tournaments. One of his largest live paydays to date came by virtue of finishing 26th in the World Poker Tour’s (WPT) Doyle Brunson Five Diamond World Poker Classic in December for $43,000. On whether he feels he takes a patient approach, Charania commented, “I think I play kind of tight, so I’m fairly patient. It’s probably because I used to play a lot of cash games to make money. Sometimes, I wouldn’t play within my bankroll, so I’d just sit and wait for hands.” You can catch him at left doing his best Phil Laak impersonation.

Many PocketFivers have attempted to make the transition from cash games to tournaments or vice versa with varied success. For Charania, it’s ended with being one of the most respected players in the industry. He explained how he was able to make the transition with ease: “Playing cash games helped my tournament game a lot. I feel like I can play a lot more post-flop early on in tournaments. Later on, it becomes a pre-flop game. When you play cash, you’re always deep-stacked, so it helps you play post-flop and accumulate chips early when the blinds are very low.”

Charania has a long career in poker ahead of him. He has two Top 30 finishes in WPT events in 2009 (15th at the Southern Poker Championship and 27th at the Bay 101 Shooting Star tournament) and has only begun to break into live poker. On where he sees himself in the future, he revealed, “I’m currently in law school, but I decided to take a semester off and focus fully on poker until September. Until I’m done playing every live and online tournament and putting in a lot of volume, I won’t know where I see myself.”

Paco Hope is one of the main men behind a study that has influenced judges around the United States to conclude that poker is a game of skill. Most recently, Dr. Robert Hannum from the University of Denver walked Judge Larry Duffy through its results in South Carolina, leading to a proclamation that poker is a game of skill. Of the 103 million cash game hands studied on PokerStars last December, 75% did not go to showdown. Instead, the process of betting determined the winner. Of the remaining 25%, just half were won by the player with the best five card hand. In the other half of the pots, the player with the best hand folded prior to showdown.

Hope describes why Cigital and PokerStars elected to conduct the study: “What we were hoping to do was an empirical study, which was the first of its kind, where we looked at 100 million hands and said what ratio of them actually saw a showdown. In our mind, whether you or not you go to a showdown determines the effective skill of the game.” Some have argued that its results mean that Texas Hold’em is 88% skill. In just 12% of hands, the player with the best hand won.

On its results, which were recently released to the public, Hope explained, “We think that the 75% of hands ending without anyone revealing their cards clearly shows something else is at work.” He continued, “We’re looking to answer the question of dominance. This is not a gambling game like a slot machine or a lottery. It can be regulated separately and can be legislated separately. I’d say it’s closer to golf than a slot machine in terms of the amount of skill involved.”

Check out more of Charania and Hope this week on the PocketFives.com Podcast.

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