by Arsham
Is Poker Luck? Cracked Pocket Aces Says Yes!
2:08 pm in Physical Supernatural by Arsham
I often find myself asking, “is poker luck?” (talking strictly about No Limit Texas Hold’em here).
I mean it seems like it all depends on the cards that are turned over.
But back to the question at hand: “Is poker skill or luck?” — or what combination of each?
Let’s talk about “getting lucky” for a moment…
Having good luck in poker is not (necessarily) something you can control ( unless you believe in NLP 
).
When it comes to changing your luck at poker, you could stop playing hands when you notice that you’re not getting good cards or if people keep getting lucky and “bad-beating” you.
Here are some examples from the recent (2009) World Series of Poker (WSOP) of where pocket aces were cracked.
Examples of Lucky Poker (Cracking AA)
Pocket Aces getting Cracked
Actually, Lon McEachern and Norman Chad (the WSOP commentators) mentioned that it takes more than pocket aces to make the final table.. and they are right!
1) Begleiter has Jack 9 of diamonds and raises to 450k. Lamb, sitting next to Begleiter, has pocket aces and raises it to 1.1 million. Begleiter is feeling lucky, so he calls.
The flop comes 5, Jack, 9 – Begleiter has Jacks up. He slow plays his two pair by checking to Lamb, who raises 1.5 million. Begleiter pushes all in and gets the call.
The turn and river are no help to Lamb, so his pocket aces were cracked!
The odds went like this (Begleiter/Lamb): Preflop (20/80) – Flop (75/25) – Turn (82/18)
So you can see, Begleiter was LUCKY enough to win when he only had 20% chance of doing so! Is poker luck? – that situation suggests it is!
2) Robbins raised with pocket aces, but didn’t raise enough because Akenhead raised all in pre-flop with K Q off suit. Robbins calls, and they flip the cards over.
Akenhead only had a 13% chance to win preflop, but when the flop came KJQ, his two pair put him at a 62% chance to win (that means Robbins still has a 38% change of winning this hand). But the next two cards that come out are blanks for Robbins and his pocket aces were cracked by two pair.
So Akenhead was having good poker luck because he turned his 13% into 62%, whereas Robbins couldn’t do anything with his 38%!
3) Robbins now doesn’t have many chips left, so when he gets pocket 10′s, he pushes all in. Cada has pocket aces, so he calls instantly.
Preflop, Robbins only has a 21% chance of winning (or splitting the pot). Flop comes 6, K, 2 rainbow – and now Robbins only has a 9% chance. The turn is a 5, and now Robbins only has a 5% chance of getting a 10 on the river to win the pot.
Is poker all luck? – Well when you go all in pre flop and are already behind in the hand, yes, poker is all luck at that point!
Guess what.. a 10 comes on the river and Robbins wins the hand to stay alive! It takes more than pocket aces to make the final table (or to win a hand in general!).
Being Good at Poker Involves Skill
These examples of where people are getting lucky and beating pocket aces are rare, I do admit that.
There are many hands played in every tournament or cash game – and some of them come down to someone getting really fortunate – but there is some skill involved too.
Raising to represent that you have a big hand can often scare your opponents away, even if they have the best hand (your raise makes them believe they are beat). Knowing when the other player is bluffing or doesn’t have the best possible hand takes skill, and practice is the only way to gain that skill.
But if someone asked “is poker luck?” - I would tend to say yes. I think it is more luck than skill, especially when you are very skilled yourself and are playing with people that are equally as skilled.
What do you think? Are you a poker player who knows something about the game? Comment below..
Hi! This is an issue that can make poker seem like a paradox. I’m a professional player and my short answer is “yes and no and yes.”
In the short term, whether or not a skilled player wins or loses is determined much by luck. But in the long term, a skilled player is almost guaranteed to win (assuming he’s not only playing against players as skilled as him). The money he saves from his good folds, plus the money he earns from his well-calculated bets (and the mistakes his opponents make by calling those bets), all adds up to a steady hourly profit that reveals itself when the streaks of good and bad luck cancel each other out.
Notice the stipulation, “when the streaks cancel out.” Theoretically, it’s possible for the best player in the world to lose at every table he sits at for the rest of his life, and likewise for the worst player to beat every table! For this reason, one could take the view that poker is completely luck, and in a way he’d be right. I take a different approach. If P is the probability of a good player losing in the long term, then I say poker is (100*P)% luck in the long term. I think most pros would agree that P is astronomically low, so in the long run, poker rounds to 100% skill.
Think of it like this: the pros are the “house” and the fish are the gamblers. It’s almost as hard for a pro to lose in the long run as it is for the casino to lose in the long run (I say “almost” because the casino needs no skill, whereas a pro must keep playing well). For a bad poker player to win in the long run would be like a craps player winning in the long run.
It’s like any other event involving chance. If you flip a coin 10 times, it’s not so unlikely for it to land on Tails 10 times. But after 10^100 flips, the percentage will be pretty darn close to 50%, otherwise a miracle has happened. When a pro loses one night, he doesn’t quit poker forever. He keeps playing because he trusts that over time, the percentages will happen as math dictates they should.
Defining the skill-luck ratio for a short term is trickier. I think the ideal way to define it would be to find someone in the universe who plays absolutely perfect poker (pretend there’s a genius alien out there that happens to play poker), make it play in Earth’s casinos, and keep a log of its results. Whatever the alien’s win percentage for a given period of time, is the true percentage of skill involved in that length of poker session. So if the alien wins in every 7 out of 10 hours it plays, then an hour of poker is 70% skill. If it wins 9 out of 10 days it plays, then a day of poker is 90% skill, and so on. Since we don’t have a perfect player on Earth, we can’t know what the true short-term ratio of skill to luck is, nor the time-dependent function.
Keep in mind that I’ve mainly been talking about cash games. A tournament involves more luck because you only get one buy-in (or your rebuys are small compared to the average chipstack), the blinds increase, and the chips aren’t worth money until you place. I’m only a cash player, but I think most tournament players would agree that a single tournament is mostly luck (my own uneducated guess would be 80%). As for the long-term luck factor of tournaments, I have no clue, but I have to imagine it’s greater than that of cash games.
You also mentioned the possibility of equally skilled players playing each other. In such a game, any win (short term or long) would be purely luck, as would any loss. In the long run, they should all make nothing from each other, and will end up losing to the rake. I hope it’s a long time before this becomes the state of poker…long live the fish!
of cource poker, especially tournament is all luck. for example, in wsop 2010 the champion won four times with bad started hans such as 10svs11, jjvskk, 1qvs1k and all those hands mizrachi won
as nuguen said, in mtt poker depends on pure luck
if somone say poker is skill not luck he tells a big lie
mdk
LOL @ “long live the fish” hahah
Frank – I agree with everything you said. Well put and thanks for your thoughts.
I just want to say that the reason poker seems like it’s all luck is because when you’re watching the WSOP, there is no second chances. You mentioned something to this effect when talking about tournament play.. you only get one buy in.. so if you go bust, you’re done.
That’s why when you see a crazy hand (where the odds are defied) – you think to yourself that poker must be all luck.
I know that it’s not, and agree with your entire response regarding the skilled player will make money in the long term.
Best of luck to you
(and I actually mean that.. even if you’re sitting across the table from me)
Thanks and same to you! There are some people I don’t mind losing to and you’d be one of them, hah.
One thing I forgot to add: to play cash games in stakes higher than you can afford, is to reduce poker to a short-term game, and therefore it makes your success greatly depend on luck. It becomes more like a tournament because if you get sucked out a few times, you’re dead.
The general consensus for no-limit hold’em is that a good, tight-aggressive player should be able to afford losing 20 buy-ins of the stakes he wants to play in, and to me this seems pretty accurate. A buy-in is defined as 100 big blinds, but really this isn’t necessary because in most stakes you can get away with buying in for less. In order to play 1/2 NL, one should have $4,000 in spare cash. But if you’re not someone who has an advantage over most tables he sits at, then you should have more than that.
Those rules can be found online and there are separate rules for limit hold’em, omaha, and tournament play.
if you think poker is skill rather than luck, please watch wsop 2011, how mizrachi won