Home / Poker News April 2009 / Studies say poker IS a game of skill part 1
Studies say poker IS a game of skill part 1
Posted by: James Carter. - Thu, 2009-04-09 08:10
Most legislation forbidding online poker and poker around the world is based on the presumption that poker is a game of chance and therefore it can be taken under the same umbrella with online casinos and gambling. Poker players have known all along that poker is in fact a game of skill, which does indeed have an element of chance in it, but the eventual outcome of which is – at the end of the day - decided by skill. While the skill argument was definitely there, hard evidence supporting the theory was much more difficult to produce.
Attempts to illustrate the skill factor in action have included pitting poker bots against one another, developing theoretical models, etc. Though many of these tests did produce relevant results, the scientific community has dismissed them considering that the experiments that led to the said results didn’t accurately reproduce the mechanics of real poker action. That in turn led to courts dismissing these results as well and keeping poker and online poker either outside the law or within heavily regulated frameworks, all under the pretext that it was in fact gambling.
Researchers Jan-Philipp Rock and Ingo Fiedler of the University of Hamburg have undertaken a test of their own though, this time one based on actual poker hands played by poker players online. The study analyzed more than 55,000 NL Holdem hands recorded in an actual online poker room, without the participants being aware that they were taking part in any type of research. The scientists focused on two factors deemed most relevant in determining the role of skill in the game: the fluctuation of players’ wins and losses and their win-loss average. The study did indeed yield relevant results towards confirming that good players did indeed better than their less skilled counterparts, and that the degree to which they were better than their opponents was well outside the variation caused by chance.
The conclusions are that it takes about 1,000 NL Holdem hands for the skill factor to make its presence felt (in a good way or in a bad one) for the average poker player. 1,000 hands would amount to about 33 hours of offline play and 13 hours of online action. Given the fact that most players easily cross that mark in one of their early sessions, the study has concluded that poker was indeed a game in which the result was predominantly dependant on skill.
