Whether poker qualifies as a "game of chance" has significant legal implications. In can determine whether a game is legal or not, as many states exempt games of skill from anti-gambling rules. No surprise then (as the Los Angeles Times reports), the definition of poker has become a question for the courts.
Many games are easy to identify as either games of skill or games of chance, even though they combine a bit of both. Football is mostly about the skill of the players and coaches, but chance influences the games as well. There are some things that can influence the outcome of a game, such as the weather in an outdoor stadium, that are completely beyond human control. We still would not say football is a "game of chance," as the better team with better coaches will win more often than not.
Sports are easy. More difficult are games in which chance plays a larger, if not wholly determinative role. Consider Backgammon. Chance -- the rolls of the dice -- can determine the outcome in any single game. Yet there is significant skill involved in playing well and, over time, a better player will beat a worse player more often than not. Other games, such as Blackjack, are clearly games of chance even if they involve some small amount of skill. In Blackjack, for instance, there is a "best" way to play that will minimize one's losses against the house, but the result is still up to chance. If you play the perfect Blackjack game (without counting cards), and the dealer follows house rules, whether you win or lose is completely up to chance (and your odds are not that good).
So what's poker? In my opinion, playing poker at a high level requires an immense amount of skill, and better poker players will regularly outperform their less skilled competitors. Yet skill is no guarantee of victory in poker; the cards may still have their say. According to a judge quoted in the LA Times article: "A poker player may give himself a statistical advantage through skill or experience, but that player is always subject to defeat when the next card is turned." Nonetheless, some charged with organizing or participating in illegal poker games are pressing the argument that poker is not a "game of chance" and is not illegal under state statutes prohibiting gambling on such games. I wish them luck when they make this argument in court.
MANY people make it their career playing hold'em. They have enough skill that they will beat poorer players more often than not over time, even given a long run of bad cards. My best friend, a lawyer in Vegas, plays that card game several nights a week and has made several thousand dollars per year over the past few years.
On the other hand, I assume states that want to classify every game as either a game of chance OR a game of skill would want to have some cutoff -- the game is legal if the degree of chance is not too large and the degree of skill is not too small.
I will eat my keyboard if the statutes even mention regression analysis.
I would also like to know whether gambling on Contract Bridge is legal or illegal in states that distinguish between chance and skill.
I don't see how 21 isn't a game of skill.
You only have to look at the mit team for an example
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21_%282008_film%29
playing pokerpracticing law at a high level requires an immense amount of skill, and betterpoker playerslawyers will regularly outperform their less skilled competitors. Yet skill is no guarantee of victory inpokercourt;the cardsjudges may still have their say.So then, Litigation is a game of chance, and ought to be illegal in the same states.
Mark: Is this a game of chance?
W.C. Fields: Not the way I play it.
=====================
HA! I tried to put JA's headline in as the lede of my comment and got this gem back:
For shame Jonathan, for shame.
Yet skill is no guarantee of victory in p-ker; the cards may still have their say.
Along Dirc's lines, f--tball is a game of skill, yet time and chance do happen to all teams.
Were I a jurist or legislator, I would favor a narrow interpretation that confines "games of chance" to games of *pure* chance -- r-ulette, sl-ts.
Odds of beating the house soft 17 bl@ckj@ck is about 48.5%. Not awesome, by any means, but better than getting cert petition granted, reversing an agency decision, or getting to present a civil suit to a jury. So which one is the game of chance again?
Yes. Even if the bets were randomly anonymized each time they were made, and the order of betting was hidden from the players, I do not think skill would not be totally eliminated as an important variable.
The other problem is that we like to lionize sports victors and treat their victory as solely determined by their moxy, skill, confidence, and/or the failure of their opponents.
For example, when a David beats a Goliath even though the Vegas oddsmakers gave them only a 10% chance, most sportswriters and newscasters aren't going to talk about the Davids' "luck", they are going to say "this Superbowl proves that if if a team with spunk and inner fire have enough courage to stare down the seemingly indomitable Goliaths of the game, they too can emerge victorious: its a lesson for us all."
Relatedly, luck in football is not really quantifiable, so it can be conveniently ignored. The same is not true of pöker.
By the way, the application of the blacklist to this particular article is frustrating.
Haven't played in about two years though.
Odds of beating the house soft 17 bl@ckj@ck is about 48.5%. Not awesome, by any means, but better than getting . . .
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Better than anything else in the casin0 (except if you ONLY play odds at cr@ps, and you can't play odds unless you play a line bet first (or you play somebody else's odds, which not all casinos will allow)), and WAY THE HELL better than the odds on any state l0ttery.
But in blackjack, poker, football, betting the horses, playing the stock market (which is just like blackjack-- the result is a matter of chance and the house cannot be beaten in the long term), etc., there are elements of skill and chance. They are all, quite simply, games of both skill and chance.
Thus, I would suggest that regulators need to adopt a distinction that makes more sense than that between "chance" and "skill", based on whatever their policy objectives are.
Of course there are games of skill that have major elements of chance from nature. The wind is a major element in golf, sailing, and target shooting, for example. But those are all still obviously classic examples of games of skill. In such games, skill can be used to minimize or even eliminate the elements of chance. More importantly, those sources of chance are natural challenges and not artificially added sources of chance. And if you created a game which outcome relied entirely or primarily on the pattern of swirls of wind as it passed by the roof of the c@sino, it would still be a game of chance because it would be using a natural phenomenon to add an artificial element of chance to the game.
For those who don't know that's exactly how card counting works. In some systems at least.
The traditional way of dealing bl4ckjack was to have 10 or so decks inside a "shoe" and the dealer dealt out of the shoe. The system enabled a person to keep track of the cards dealt out of the shoe and more importantly their implication.
If certain numbers of cards come out of the deck first, that 48.5% in favor of the house shifts up to 52% or 54% or 60% or 65% in favor of the player. Card counters learn to spot when this happens and start betting the odds with big money when the odds are in their favor.
Of course the most typical way for a casin0 to defeat counters was simply to install systems that reshuffle all the cards every hand.
As for poker, I'd say it's unequivocally on the side of skill. You mentioned football, and good quarterbacks or kickers have skill, but in the end it comes down to anticipating the flight of an oddly shaped object through the air when tryin to hit a moving target. There's a lot of randomness there.
Like the coin flip at the beginning of a football game, or, more importantly, when going into overtime? Or perhaps the chance that an MLB umpire will call a pitch correctly, or miss a key call on the bases?
Somehow I don't find this definition convincing.
Is there any serious scholarship on what it is that legislatures have against g@mbling? My guess is that a lot of the earlier laws had to do with religious things, like the Methodist notion that you're supposed to get up early and plow the back 40 for your money, and not too much money at that. I've been told that in some parts of the South, the concern was that the black sheep of the family might gamble away the plantation, impairing the established order or some such. Probably lots of interesting material here.
That's less true for other forms of investment like currency and commody speculation. I think a main reason that investing isn't gambling is that you're not creating risk for the fun of it, you're shifting inherient rist to those more willing to assume it.
Actually, investors never win in the long term. Nobody beats the market (absent cheating). It's just like blackjack.
Nor does skill have any influence on the outcome long term. (This has been documented in studies of professional investment managers' performance.)
Now, as for real world benefits, that depends on (1) how one weighs the costs and benefits to society of the finance sector's activities (certainly they've come in for a lot of criticism lately) as well as (2) how one weighs the costs and benefits of traditional forms of gambling (especially its subjective value as entertainment).
Assuming the umpire is honest, errors in umpire calls are sort of like natural randomness of the wind. They're practically unavoidable elements of the game that weren't included to add chance. Indeed, umpire calls are not intended to involve any chance at all.
The coin toss in Football is not intended to add chance to the game but rather is only a way to even out a natural unfairness for which there is no obviously better solution. The coin toss still leaves variation in player performance as the large majority of the determinant of the outcome of the game.
There's no difference between the natural randomness of the wind, the natural randomness of the track condition in a horse race, the natural randomness of bad calls by an umpire, and the natural randomness of the flop in a game of hold 'em.
They are all naturally random. It is only your distinction that is artificial.
But in Bl@ckjack, the odds favor the house, so unless you can count cards, you'll lose in the long run. You don't have to "beat the market" to come out ahead with investing, provided the market as a whole does well, as it has in the long run. This is why lots of people buy index funds.
That, however, is not playing the market. Investing in an index fund is the equivalent of buying stock in the c*sino rather than playing at the b-jack table.
"Playing" the market is just as much a loser long-term as playing b-jack.
The stock market is in no way, shape, or form a game of chance, any more than lending my sister $20 bucks in hopes that she'll repay me later with interest is a game of chance. My jury is still out on whether betting on horse races is a game of chance, depending on the type of information available to those placing the bets, and the degree to which expertise influences success, vis a vis the control of the odds and bets exercised by those who put on the race.
State lotteries are without question a game of chance, and I would certainly do away with them if given the choice.
You don't have to beat the market to win. If you just match the market you'll very likely have won. You'll usually win even if you do worse than the market.
This is doubtful. The average investment manager may not be any better than the market, but it's likely that some of them are. And the good ones may not work as investment managers. There were surely investment managers out there who had done at least a little better than the market over their lifetime when they died. How could any study tell that that particular person was no better than average?
If the markets are thought to be beneficial, then they're not gambling even if in fact that conclusion is mistaken.
That the large negatives are slightly mitigated by the small benefits of gambling doesn't mean that gambling isn't gambling. Obviously a game of pure chance is gambling, even if it is entertaining or has some other small benefits.
There is such a distinction, and it comes from a term in finance: alpha, or the amount of actual return over the expected return.
In p0ker, in a given position with regards to the big blind, your cards have an expected return on investment, a "market return". It is the chance of winning a given pot versus any random hand. One can look through a long-term database or calculate using probability for example that the hand A-A has an 80% chance of winning the pot versus a random hand. Now, if you can increase the percentage of the time you win with the hand over the long run, to say, winning 85% of all pots you enter with AA, you have demonstrated alpha, ergo idiosyncratic skill. In practice, when people play "Big Pair" hands, by the later streets their hands are pretty obvious, and so the goal is more to minimize the losses you COULD take with such an "obvious hand" than maximize the winnings -- though the substantial winnings, the rare times they occur, as you pretend you're tilting at the same time possessing the stone cold nuts, feel grand.
The larger the positive variance possible in a game, above the expected return with no forced decisions -- which should also be $0 in the long run for it to be a fair game -- the more skill the game requires. In actuality, the edges one can show in p0ker are quite small in magnitude compared to the expected return, but the enjoyable thing about it is that you're weighting these edges with very, very, large sums of money over time.
I had the same reaction--how is contract bridge treated? Undoubtedly, the hand one is dealt is determined by luck. But in tournaments where several teams play the same cards, the aspect of luck is cleverly removed.
And, while I'm not a bridge player myself, a couple of my friends are getting more serious about the game--and the amount of skill and thought involved is truly impressive.
Even if the particular game under discussion doesn't pass muster, I do wonder whether bridge could pass that test.
Probably the same holds true for P0ker.
Why can't all these games be games of both skill and luck?
Anyone who thinks p0ker isn't a skill game hasn't played much. I've come to regard p0ker as the supreme game. Nothing else comes close.
I mean that in games of chance, randomness is added to the game for the very purpose of adding randomness. In horse racing effort is expended to make the track as non random as is practical. Umpire calls are theoretically not supposed to be random at all, and fallible umpires are only included for lack of an obvious practical alternative. But in cards, the games are designed to involve the highly random process of shuffling, which is usually the dominant determinant of the outcome.
Although the friendly players "control" the shuffle in the sense that they shuffle the cards themselves, they still don't control the sequence of the cards. It's still gambling and a game of chance, because it's a game that is designed to have a large chance element which is beyond the skill of the players to influence.
Fama and French have investigated this and concluded, if I remember right, that there is no evidence that any investment managers have beaten the market after expenses except by chance, though there is evidence that some do consistently worse than chance. The basic approach is to ask how many managers would achieve various levels of better (and worse)-than-the-market if departures from the market were random, and then compare those results with the actual numbers. A particular better-than-the-market lifetime average doesn't even suggest that that result was achieved because of skill, rather than by chance, any more than a series of coin flips that come up heads shows that the flipper can control the outcome of coin tosses. I don't have a citation to the Fama &French paper at hand; sorry.
None of this means that investment advisers don't perform useful services. It just means that they can't beat the market.
I'd say yes and no, but I'm probably just quibbling.
"playing the market" in the sense of day trading is essentially just making short term bets against mob psychology with very little information.
But index funds aren't always the highest returns. At the other end you have an investor who looks very carefully at an investment and buys stock (perhaps a substantial stake) in a single company.
In my mind the second is reasonably close to being a "skill" bet, there's reliable enough ways to determine whether a company is a fundamentally sound investment or not.
I'm not so sure there's a clean cut line between the two.
If I recall correctly, the study showed that high risk funds tend to win big, but also tend to lose big, and over 10-15-20-25 years, their wins and losses don't end up being better than the 7% or so the index funds grew over the same time period. THen when you factor in the fact that those high return funds take a huge cut of the profits right on top, that 7% on a flat fee trade or tiny commission ends up being a better investment.
I'm also a p0ker player. P0ker is also definitely a game of skill.
But the most bizarre comment on this thread has been Dilan Esper's:Having worked in the securities field, that statement is just idiotic.
If it's a game of skill and luck, it is still a game of luck. It's like if there is a law to shut down ph@rmacies that sell illegal drgs, a ph@rmacy would still get shut down for selling illegal drgs, even though it didn't sell illegal drgs exclusively.
A lot of people are suggesting that games like p0ker are games of skill because skilled players tend to beat less skilled players over a large number of games. But nobody is claiming that there is NO skill in p0ker. The question is whether p0ker is a game of chance. It is a game of chance because a large element of chance is designed into the game. It's not just that there is a significant element of chance as a result of the game's design, but the randomness itself is the goal of that element of the game's design.
As a professional p0ker player, I have zero doubt that p0ker is fundamentally a game of skill. I think the problem lies in the scope of the view that people take of the game.
When you consider a single hand of p0ker, there's a lot of luck. You might get better cards to start, or get lucky later on. This is analogous to a single swing in golf, where you might get a lucky bounce, or a spectator might cough at the wrong time and send your ball into the trees (where it might be savable or completely unhittable).
But when you consider a whole round of golf, or especially a whole tournament, it's clearly a game of skill. P0ker requires a slightly longer view than a single tournament or session, but if I were to play a bad player for more than a few hours, he'd be in a heap of trouble. And I'm nobody, just a middle stakes no limit grinder. Put a bad player up against Phil Ivey, and they'd have no prayer.
From my perspective, it's very clearly a game of skill.
PS: How can you screen out comments about gambling in a post about gambling? Jeez.
I'm strangely reminded of an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which the Enterprise crew constructs an image that will destroy the Borg collective. They explain that the image is of an object that cannot actually exist in three-dimensions, and in trying to figure out what object the image is an image of, the Borg will eventually assign all their mental resources and suffer a total system crash.
Maybe these litigants have a far more serious and deadly purpose?
This is off topic, but since I know quite a bit about gambling I can certainly say something about it.
The reputation of professional investment managers relies exclusively on short term variance. Every study that has ever been done on this shows that in the long term, they can't beat the market. (Indeed, you will see some of this research quoted in the stories on Bernie Madoff-- that was one of the tipoffs that he was a phony.)
What CAN happen is that people can get lucky and beat the market over the short term. But there's no secret to beating the stock market. It's just like blackjack.
And people who put their money in index funds are betting on the house. They aren't playing the market.
This is as good an example as any of Upton Sinclair's maxim that human beings cannot believe things to be true when their livelihoods depend on them being false.
But the spam filter got me every time.
So instead I wrote a post on my own blog - feel free to have a look and let me have some feedback.
Although, inbelievably I couldn't even use my primary URL in the post details - you'll see why.
I did also comment on the spam filter....
Who gets to decide if an "element" of randomness is "large"? Why isn't the overtime coin toss in a football game a "large element", except that you don't want it to be?
If I made a chess computer program that picks moves (semi-)randomly, would playing chess against that computer become a game of chance? Note that this is not a hypothetical question, because although I am not positive, I believe that many quite successful chess computer programs use probability as a guide for move selection and timing.
Another response to this argument is to note that figuring out the "purpose" of a rule change can be very difficult. Likewise with figuring whether something was "intentionally" added. Who gets to decide whether the purpose of a rule was to add randomness, or what the intent of the game designers was?
Basically, AccountingProf nailed it in the 3rd comment:
This approach works for pöker as well as, say, basketball. We could collect real data and observe actual facts, but I guess that would get in the way of vacuous, artificial distinctions between "chance" and "skill", and hand-waving theoretical arguments.
If you look at the results of high-level bridge tournaments - national and world championship events - you will find the winners consistently come from a very small group of players. You will also find some players who have won these types of event many times.
I think that evidence alone establishes bridge as a game of skill.
The same used to be true of hold'em, but doesn't seem to be as true anymore. I do think hold'em is primarily a game of skill, but the recent surge of new players, most of whom fail to establish themselves as consistent winners, leads me to believe there isn't as much skill as I used to think there was.
There is unquestionably a ton of skill that can be applied to (that game). The "game of chance"/"game of skill" dichotomy is just a silly legal construct. Nevertheless, since it happens to be the controlling legal construct in many places, we have to deal with that. Over the course of a few hands, or an evening, or 8,000 hands, the inferior player might come out ahead. With just a little information about how inferior he is and a little observation, we can quantify just how likely, and show that as the number of hands played grows, the probability of the inferior player coming out ahead shrinks until it approaches zero.
So the question boils down to "over what timeframe?" The longer the timeframe, the more that the difference in skill accounts for the difference in results between two players and the less that the difference is accounted for by luck.
Nobody plays slot machines or craps as a career.
Wrong, but the right idea.
The reputation of professional investment managers relies exclusively on short term variance. Every study that has ever been done on this shows that in the long term, they can't beat the market.
There are trading firms that have beaten the market trading equities by a wide margin over a very long period of time. Just because you can't buy their funds doesn't mean that they don't exist. But yeah, the stock picking guys running mutual funds are not beating the market.
I had the same reaction--how is contract bridge treated? Undoubtedly, the hand one is dealt is determined by luck. But in tournaments where several teams play the same cards, the aspect of luck is cleverly removed.
Reduced, not removed. For example, suppose that there is some hand where the contract is perfectly obvious to get into, and there are two lines to try: a slightly less obvious one (eg a squeeze) that is 75% to make it, the other (a finesse) that is 50%. Strong players will take the 75% chance, but there are layouts of the cards that make the higher-percentage play fail while the lower-percentage one succeed. Still, duplicate bridge is pretty far on the "skill" side of the spectrum. There was a duplicate (that game) site running for a bit, but I think they never got it rolling.
It just happens that there are now almost 10,000 entrants in the WSOP main event, and you have to be so lucky to get through that sort of a field that it's hard for top players to win it anymore. (Note, however, that Phil Ivey, perhaps the greatest player in the world, did make the final table this year.)
In the context of a law banning games of chance, judges would decide. The coin toss in football isn't really even a close call though. The coin toss at the beginning of the game is mitigated by the kickoff being reversed at half time. And the large majority of the time, the coin toss at the end of the game doesn't even come into play. Neither coin toss is an example of the game designer wanting to add an element of randomness to decide the game. It's a minimal or near minimal amount of randomness added only because there is no obvious practical alternative.
It is conceivable that there are some circumstances in chess where some randomness in move choice would be the best strategy known to the computer. If so, then it should not be considered a game of chance. It is also conceivable that a computer could randomly choose weak moves with the purpose of occasionally giving the game away to the player. The result might end up being a game of chance, somewhat like computer poker.
There can be no serious question that using shuffled cards has the purpose of and is intentionally adding major randomness to the game.
There is no dispute that p0ker involves a significant amount of skill. P0ker is a game of skill and chance, which means it is a game of chance. Calling it "a game of skill" while leaving off "and chance" is taking advantage of the ambiguity of the phrase "game of skill" to suggest that it is not a game of chance. No matter how much evidence you provide that it is a game of skill and chance, you still won't have shown that it isn't a game of chance.
But so what?
The point of the legal wrangling is silly, the only skill that matters is that of the relevant pickpocket government.
"Games of chance" played for money are illegal in lots of places, such as my own State, UNLESS the government has a direct piece of the action - say, a LOTTERY, which is much more dependent upon luck than p0k3r.
I notice the absence of the phrase "risk-adjusted basis" from your comment. Care to expand?
There is no evidence of this. Academics have been looking for half a century for investment managers-- including high-end private equity investment managers-- who can beat the market over long periods of time. There are no such animals.
Note, by the way, that arbitrage (the way most profitable hedge funds make money) is not "beating the market"-- it is taking advantage of rules that favor larger and faster investors. It's the equivalent of saying that you could "beat" the lottery by reprogramming the computers to issue you a winning ticket after the drawing.
Also, even profitable hedge funds have shown tremendous risk in the recent subprime debacles.
The reality is there's a whole class of people who would LIKE to believe that you can make money in the market in the long term by some means other than insider trading / cheating / arbitrage or luck. Indeed, there's a whole class of people who are paid big money based on that premise. But that doesn't make it reality.
Either I'm misunderstanding you or you misunderstand how card counting works. It depends on a one or two deck game to be effective, with one deck being optimal. That's because counter uses the product of two variables: one is the mix of high and low cards already played. That's the count. The other, a multiplier, is how many cards remain in the unplayed part of the deck. If it's very few, the reliability of the count for predicting what will be dealt next is high, giving the counter a big advantage. If a lot of cards remain in the deck, the predictive power of the count is low, so the counter gets little advantage. That's why all the newer casin0s that don't have to improve the players' odds to attract business use multi-deck shoes, while the only places you can find single or double deck games are those desperate for customers, usually seedier joints off the beaten path.
Perhaps it is necessary to hide your talent at this game.
But the claim as stated above is doubtful anyway because surely some of them have beaten the market, at least by luck. But it seems impossible to tell if it was entirely by luck.
Anyone who doesn't believe P0ker is a game of skill hasn't played it much. That said, luck plays a much bigger part in p0ker than it does in bridge, at least in tournament bridge. That's because most bridge tournaments use the duplicate bridge format. In duplicate bridge, half the (two player) teams are designated North-South, the other half East-West, and by the end of the tournament all the N-S teams have played all the E-W teams, and they've all played the same pre-dealt hands. That means if you're, say, a N-S team, though you played against the E-W teams, in reality you were competing against the other N-S teams to see who got the best results when playing the same hands from the same position. The only luck involved is when your opponents on any given hand play extraordinarily better or worse than the other teams that played that hand from that side of the table.
Also, the b-jack figures I've seen indicate a house margin of about 4% not 40% under perfect play without counting. Counting can give a significant player edge even with large multideck shoes.
Even a significant advantage over 46% can leave you broke. It's theoretically possible to profitably count a multi-deck shoe, but pulling it off takes some pretty good theatrical skills apart from the card play. To maximize your edge from counting, you have to make plays that call the pit boss' attention to your game, e.g., splitting 10's and suddenly multiplying the size of your bet. To do that and win, and not get kicked out or even banned, requires convincing the onlookers you're a lucky idiot, not a counter. I don't doubt there are people who can do it, but I sure can't. Given enough time, I can (modestly) beat a one or two deck game without getting booted out, but only because I eschew some of the most obvious and profitable moves. Playing that way against a shoe, I lose unless I'm lucky.
What is that if not skill?
I played low-stakes online for years and took in > 100K per year. Thanks, government, for killing it.
But that's exactly my point. If all you need is more amateurs to reduce the chance of established pros winning, then there's significantly more chance than we'd like to think. In other words, look at chess. Kasparov doesn't get any less likely to beat the 9000th amateur than the first 100. A pro football isn't less likely to win playing amateur team after amateur team. But the mods amateurs you add to the tournament, the less likely the pro is to come out on top.
But in my opinion, it's not as much from the cards, as from the decisions others make. I think Sklansky or Harrington or someone makes this point in one of their books - you can get the same starting hand against the same people with the same flop, river, and turn, but the hand will play out entirely different based on the actions of the other players, especially when bad play by some players can end up giving one (random) player an especially large stack.
I guess what I'm saying is that while bad players definitely lose their money/tournament chips fast, there's a lot of luck in who they lose it to.
In some ways the question is like asking if the game is a game of skill or a game of cards.
I don't know how the law takes this in to account nor if it should but it strikes me as relevant. Come to think of it, sports betting is illegal in many places also so even if p0ker is a game of skill, I'm not sure that will save it from being banned in its professional incarnation in some states.
"But," as Damon Runyon(?) said, "that's the way to bet."
What you say about tournament bridge is mostly true, though sometimes your opponents play badly and get lucky.
It's also true that there are consistent winners and losers at rubber bridge as played, for money, in some clubs. In that environment there is no duplication involved, since the only competitors are the four players at the table.
In fact, I dimly recall that there was actually a court case in New York revolving around the question of whether this form of the game is a game of skill. The answer was "yes."
I am not so sure. Suppose one has a p0ker tournament. Suppose the tournament has a set fee, and each player starts out each set with a set number of chips. It is played on an elimination basis and the winner is given a cash prize.
Is that still gambling? Any more than it is with professional golf?
It would seem to me that the only fair approach is to look at tournament rather than game rules.
This is true, but it doesn't mean that poke-her isn't a game of skill. In many games of skill, if you had a single elimination tournament with 10,000 entrants, the best players wouldn't win. For instance, if we had a single elimination soccer tournament with that many entrants, the best team would surely not win. Not because soccer isn't a game of skill, but because in many games of skill there is nonetheless enough luck and randomness involved that at some point you are likely to get beat in a particular game.
Chess, in this respect, is unique, and very few games would be games of skill under that standard.
Whole-dem was created as a party game to allow a large number of players (theoretically up to 23 if you don't "burn" cards) and encourage them to stay in longer than average while finishing hands quickly compared to their numbers. It's weird that it's become so predominant as a tournament game for smaller numbers, and especially for 1-on-1 paired tourneys, which it seems so unsuited to compared to, say, 7 card stuhd, which gives more information to the players. The freeze-out format of tournaments (of whatever version of pochen) is also an odd element that increases the luck factor, because the player whose winnings come early has such an advantage over others at the table. It almost seems the most un-pochenlike version of pochen is what's been promoted lately.
That's right. The paradox is that to market poke-her, it is necessary to portray it as a lottery-- anyone can win, Cinderella stories, etc.
But to escape prohibitions, it is necessary to portray the same game as one of skill.
That said, as I said upthread, the real truth is almost all games are games of both skill and chance. The people who want to call poke-her a game of chance are people who just don't think it's very moral or productive to bet money on poke-her hands. The people who want to call it a game of skill are people who think there's nothing wrong with it.
This is obviously a distinction between poke-her and other c*sino games, but the problem is, "game of skill" vs. "game of chance" doesn't capture it. There are elements of skill in those other games (except slots) and elements of chance in poker.
It would be like if the law distinguished between "foods of sustenance" and "foods of taste". Just about all food is both, though some food is better for you than other food and some food tastes better than other food.
Moreover, chance is dominant on any given hand in poker, with skill only providing a slight statistical edge over many hands.
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