What does it mean to get lucky

I used to read a lot of poker blogs but I don't so much anymore. I still read a few regularly, Danny Boy's blog is one that I read regularly. I actually like his blog.

One of the things I like about it is that it keeps me in touch with different ways of thinking about things. There really aren't many topics that Danny thinks about in the same way that I do. If you're going to play poker at all successfully I think it's important to how other people sometimes look at things. You can't do Opponent Modeling if you don't understand how opponents think.

I think a lot of poker players are very results oriented, and Danny is no exception.

3 handed, Barry was a short stack and went all in from the button and because of a dealer error, ended up doubling through me. I was supposed to have Q-2, an easy fold, but the dealer launched my card too high, and flashed. So instead of a 2, I got an Ace for A-Q. I called Barry's all in and lost the hand to his J-10. If the dealer hadn't made that error, I would have folded the Q-2 and Barry would not have won that hand.

Danny seems to think that it was bad luck for him to have the 2 replaced by an Ace. Of course, that's absurd, it was good luck, just a bad outcome.

It doesn't make any sense at all to consider a huge increase in equity (which is the direct effect of replacing a duece with an ace) as bad luck. But players do that sort of thing all the time.

Danny's right in that results is really all that matters once it's all over. But, before you get there it's the path and the intended destination that matters, not the eventual actual outcome.

There's nothing really wrong with being results oriented unless that form of thinking carries over to the actual analysis of the game. That's bad. That leads to not changing your underwear as long as you're on a winning streak.

Rhetoric of law

Unless you're the President or Attorney General of the United States, law has a huge effect on your life and how you're allowed to live it. Law rules your life and activities with a somewhat iron fist. It's not entirely iron, it's just as hard and tight as iron, but it lacks the clear form of iron. Law is formed from rhetoric.

Law has no requirement to actually make any sense. A lot of people have trouble with that -- both lawyers and non-lawyers alike try hard to make sense of law. The whole legal industry is built around the attempt to make sense of it. So we fool ourselves into thinking it does make sense.

That's the only thing I can figure is driving this nonsense debate about whether poker is a game of predominantly skill over chance. It matters because some laws make a distinction between games of skill and games of chance. But just because a low makes such a distinction doesn't mean that it's a real distinction.

It's not real. It's nonsense. Lou Krieger has another post about it, the whole post is written with the presumption that it actually means something to contrast skill and chance. Assuming something is true does not make it true.

Lou is so busy supporting the rhetoric that he gives an argument that he thinks supports the side that poker is a predominately skill game, but the argument actually supports the side that poker is predominately a game of chance.

Most of the legal wrangling centered on determining the preponderance of skill or luck in poker. In my opinion, determining skill versus luck is not a function of looking at any given hand, but one of bounding the issue. In other words, how long does a game of poker take?

Before I get to the whole arguement, I have to comment on the rhetoric part of it. Bounding the issue? What the hell does that mean? It certainly sounds like it means something (good rhetoric usually does), but it doesn't really mean anything in this context (depending on your goals, good rhetoric can intentionally have no meaning).

Elsewhere in the post Lou points to a couple of academics as possible saviors in the debate. Economist Steve Levitt of the University of Chicago and Stat/OR guy Jay Kadane of Carnegie-Mellon. Both well known math/dweeb type academic research guys who have shown interest in various issues about skill in games. In that context bounding might refer to the idea of bounded, as in bounded sets or bounded rationality. That basically refers to imposing limits.

So he wants to put limits on the issue? No, he wants to treat the question as a question posed in the long-term, in unbounded time.

If you were to conclude that each hand constitutes a “game,” then poker is surely a game where luck predominates. But if a “game” is construed as lasting a year, or five years, or ten years, or even a lifetime, then skill prevails. In the long run, a player’s results tend to mirror his or her expectation — for better or for worse.

In other words, if you play poker long enough, you figure to reap what you sow. In the short run, anything can happen.

So rather than bounding the timeframe he looks at, he wants to look at the long run, an unbounded time frame.

But what skill there is in poker isn't applied to the long run, it's applied over the long run, a bet at a time. Each bet requires the application of gambling skill. Each bet doesn't stand alone in the sense that a sequence of bets aren't independent.

From a point of view of government regulation, the gambling operator normally offers the game a hand at a time -- not only can players come and go between hands but the fee is collected at the hand level (sometimes at the level of half hour increments).

According to Lou's argument that means poker is primarily a game of chance. Good argument Lou.

Some more on luck v. skill

I just made a post over at www.mathandpoker.com on the age old question of skill v. luck in poker. As I've said many, many times (mostly on rgp), I think the question is a very silly one, but I keep answering it anyway.

In writing that mathandpoker post I looked up some old stuff I've said before on rgp but didn't use most of it in that post. So I thought I'd put some of together here.

Skill is about decision making. It's about the management of luck. It's about the process.

Luck is about outcomes.

I think the whole concept of contrasting skill and luck in an attempt to attribute outcomes to some skill/luck distribution is nonsense.

It's like saying life is 72% what kind of car you drive and 38% whether you remember your mother's birthday.

Poker skill isn't about winning specific hand match-ups. It's about the kinds of bets you make, the kind of match-ups you get involved in.

Part of what skill is involves making your own luck. BThere a lot of ways to do it. Brunson talked about it in his Super System I but I don't think he had the writing skills to really make it clear.

The way of making your own luck that Brunson harped on was using early aggression with a lot of bluffing with outs (semi-bluffing).

The idea was that he could pick up a small pot about 40% of the time and the other 60% of the time he'd play for a slightly bigger pot as a slight dog.

His overall EV at the time of his bet was positive, but the only hands people
saw were the ones he went to the river as a dog. So the only times he showed a winning hand were the times he got all the money in as a dog. When he won it looked like he was lucky.

The reality was that he wasn't lucky at all, he was just skillfull but it was hard for an observer to realize that.

After his book he had to adapt other ways to get lucky since his book was widely read. But the readers seem to have never understood that luck is not something different from skill at all.