One of the ways to suggest an answer to the question of skill or luck is
to watch the TV online casino tournaments and notice how often some professional
players seem to make the final table. Another clue to this question is
taking stock of a local poker room and who seems to win more often than
not. Some players are luckier than others, but it seems that skill over
time wins out over luck. This is particularly true in cash games.
Luck in tournaments does play a bigger part since one bad bet can end
the tournament for a solid player. In tournaments you can often see a
river card out of nowhere beat a very good starting hand of a
professional and the amateur that lucked out continues in the game.
Many state legislatures have decided in favor of skill when letting
poker rooms legally run in the state. The skill quality of the game
overcame the prohibition against gambling. Watch the fate of any new
player learning the game during the early stages of their learning curve
and you can easily see that their skill level is suspect and they only
seem to win with lucky draws or very powerful starting hands. They are
lost when it comes to knowing when to bluff or play a marginal hand.
Solid players who have a knack for doing the right move at the right
time are the personification of poker skill. They rarely make a playing
mistake and are only beat by an unexpected draw of luck or four running
suited cards in the flop to give the Ace holding player a flush. You
see many hands like this in online tournaments. Watching pairs of Aces
get cracked online is an ugly display of how fickle the game can be at
times.
Knowledge and experience are usually rewarded in a cash game and to a
lesser degree in tournaments. The big reason for the difference is the
player can rebuy in the cash game and when they lose their starting
stack in a tournament they are knocked out of the tournament.
Tournament play does seem to have a greater element of luck in its play.
This is especially true when these Internet players are willing to go
all in at the start of a hand. They play power poker and do not wait to
see if they make their hand or not. In cases like this you may as well
be playing showdown and not Holdem. Big pairs are likely to be over
bet before the flop in tournaments and under bet in cash games.
Patience also seems to be a bigger factor in cash games and less of an
element in tournament play. Tournaments reward very aggressive play
far more than cash games. As a group of players, cash game
professionals are often more skillful players.
The betting level of the game also seems to bring more skill into play.
The higher the betting level the more skill you will see in the play.
Low-level games are hard to win with just skill, as there are too many
players who will call even when the odds are very much out of favor
toward them. No limit games will be filled with skillful players who
know how to play. This is true in spades if the blinds are also very
high. Players who are learning would be advised to stick with the lower
level games until they have a better understanding of how the game
should be played.
Making set up bets and bluffing are not the new player's best play.
Skilled players do it all of the time. They also seem to know exactly
the amount they should wager to get their opponent to call. Getting the
maximum amount of money for a winning hand is a learned skill and not a
play that should be left to luck.
The other part of luck versus skill is luck cannot be counted on from
day to day, but skill can be maintained from one session to the next.
This alone may be the reason that familiar faces are seen at tournament
after tournament. It is hard to beat a player who plays well and makes
few mistakes. As the song goes, they know when to Holdem and when to
Foldem. Mistake free play is hard to win against when a player is
counting on lucky draws to bail them out of bad calls. Players sitting
at a poker table make miracle draws every day. The difference from a
skill standpoint is the odds are taken into account before the draw and
the player knows that the play will depend on the odds. The player who
depends on luck to win will be disappointed many times and does not
even consider the odds of the play they are making. A blind eye to the
odds of the play can be very costly over time and over many poker
sessions.
Conclusions
Most solid players would come down on the side of skill in this debate.
They saw it happen in their own play, as they got better at the game of
poker. Early on they had games where they got very lucky, but over
time they began to realize that they could not depend on luck to win.
As they learned more about the inner workings of the game, they began to
play with greater skill and their wins and losses were reversed to the
win side of the ledger. Many of these same players have had two other
significant advantages over the older players. They could read any of
the really good books on poker that are now available. They could also
play thousands of hands on the Internet at online poker rooms. The old
time poker players had to spend a long time playing poker to log the
same number of games and the experience that real time play gives to a
player. This accounts to some degree for the young players doing so
well in tournaments. Skill in the long run is the bread and butter to a
winning poker player.