A rudimentary explanation of why poker is a game of skill:

There is a reason why casinos don’t run a poker table like they do a blackjack table (or any other table for that matter). Look at a game like blackjack (also known as 21): it is a game where a dealer and a player adhere to a set of rules, the player places a bet against the CASINO’s money before the game starts and then the dealer and the player each try to make a hand with a value as close to 21 as possible. Sounds simple enough, right?

Poker is a game where the casino will NOT play against the player because they cant reliably make money. In the game of poker people receive cards, and then are allowed to make a decision to play or not based on the value of their hand. Furthermore players are allowed to increase the stakes AFTER being allowed to make an informed decision based on the value of their cards. For either of these reasons alone casinos can NOT control a game of poker to the point where they can reliably make money. When a poker player sees their first two cards, they can reliably determine the statistical favorite to win any particular hand, and therefore can control their odds of winning. Additionally players are allowed to continually evaluate their cards as a hand progresses. Once again this allows a player to make an informed decision about where they stand in any particular hand, and mitigate their losses if they made a bad decision or became unlucky.

Poker quickly becomes much more complex than what I said above, as you have to weigh little details that change your percentages in various ways. For example you may have cards that are the favorite by 60 percent to win, but as the hand progresses you may see a swing that alters things by 60 percent, and you need to know that this does not equal 0 or 120 percent. My girl friend equates the math to shopping… If your 100 dollar item is on sale at 50 percent off, plus an additional 50 percent off, this does NOT make it free!!! The math should go something like 50 percent of 100 equals 50 dollars, plus an additional 25 dollars off (50 percent of 50 dollars). Your sale price is 25 dollars (a good deal, but again not free). So in poker when you have an 80 change of winning and then things change for the worse by 30 percent you need to know that you now have a 56 percent chance of winning (not a 50 percent chance of winning). From here it gets even more complex, but the bottom line is that it takes skill, knowledge, discipline, and a fortified emotional constitution to be a consistently winning poker player, and luck has very little to do with it.

If you want to argue my comparison of blackjack and poker, I will simply say this. Professional blackjack players must sacrifice a little loss to the casino to generate big wins, and the skill is not in the game, but actually outside the game. Think of your favorite competitive online video game… when someone gets outside the map and takes advantage of the situation, you call them a cheater, even though you could have gone outside the map yourself. It is the same with professional blackjack players, counting cards, and the casino banning them from playing. I will follow up with more on this at another date.

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