Pure Luck or Total Skill?

Pure Luck or Total Skill?

Blog Article

Whether gambling is based on luck or skill depends on the specific game being played.

For instance, games like slot machines, roulette, and lotteries depend almost entirely on luck. The outcomes are random and there is no strategy that can change what is essentially a random draw or spin.

On the other hand, certain games such as poker, blackjack, and sports betting do involve a significant element of skill. Knowledge, experience, and strategic decision-making can greatly affect the outcome of these games.

But remember, regardless of whether a game is primarily based on luck or skill, the house usually has an edge, and all forms of gambling have potential risks and should be approached responsibly.

It’s the final of the World Series of Poker. Player A has bet all his chips with a made straight. He is all-in and is waiting for his opponent, Player B, to make a decision. Player B, meanwhile, is sitting with a nut flush draw with two cards to go.

Player B knows he has only a handful of potential cards in the deck that can improve his hand, and figures that his ‘hand odds’ are about 4/1. However, if he bets and wins the hand, his pot odds – ie. the amount of chips he stands to gain – is roughly 8/1. Statistically, then, does he gamble and play the favorable odds, or fold, wait for another good spot, and avoid the gamble altogether?

Here’s our next scenario: it’s a soccer qualifier for the World Cup. With a matter of seconds remaining, and the home team needing to score to win the match and qualify for the finals, needs to go all-out. With virtually the last kick of the match, the home team’s striker launches a speculative ball into the opposing team’s penalty area, it ricochets off the goalpost, back off a defender, and into the goal. The winning team celebrate their outrageous luck wildly.

 

Finally, a gambler in a Vegas casino walks up to a roulette table, closes his eyes and throws a large stack of $100 chips onto no. 36, then waits for the ball to come to a rest. The ball duly hits 36, he picks up his $3,500 winnings and walks off.

Let’s take a look at poker first, as more than any other games, poker is the one most fiercely debated as regards to its skill vs. gamble elements.

The adage goes that for recreational poker players, poker is 30 percent skill and 70 percent luck, while for pros those figures are reversed.

In an article called “The Role of Skill versus Luck in Poker: Evidence from the World Series of Poker” by Steven D. Levitt and Thomas J. Miles, a group of highly skilled poker players at the 2010 World Series of Poker 온라인카지노사이트 were analyzed. That set of players achieved an average return on investment (ROI) of over 30 percent, compared to a -15 percent for all other players at the tournament.

If poker was a game of pure luck, as many jurisdictions around the world surmise, then why do the best players in the world constantly reach final tables at big tournaments?

While it’s true that calculating odds does play a part in poker as we saw in our first example – after all, a large part of poker is based on the turn of a card – there are so many other elements to the game that poker can never be treated truly as a game of chance.

And while for every winner in poker there has to be a loser – those buy-ins have to go somewhere – employing skill in poker allows the top players to override the luck factor.

Let’s go back to our soccer analogy. Tom Tango, author of ‘The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball’, suggested that if you consider just games where a team wins or loses (draws in games make the calculations far too complicated) luck actually plays a bigger factor in sports results than you expect.

In fact, when applying Tango’s calculations to soccer over a typical 10-month season, variations in results due to luck accounts for around 35% of the total variance (luck) leaving around 65% attributed to talent. This is good news for the skillful footballers as talent has approximately double the effect on a team’s win percentage that luck has.

However, this still means that around one third of a team’s win percentage is purely down to random chance. If that’s true, why isn’t soccer considered a game of chance like poker?