Slashdot Mirror
Revised Mass. Gambling Bill Won't Criminalize Online Poker
travdaddy writes "As reported on Slashdot only about a week ago, a passage of a gambling bill in Massachusetts would have criminalized online poker. That passage has been stricken due to the help of a grass-roots organization called the Poker Players Alliance. It 'quickly got the message to all of its Massachusetts members — around 25,000 people — and over 1,000,000 nationwide to make their voices heard; apparently lawmakers were listening since the language making online poker illegal — and online gaming in general — was taken out of the legislation.' Another Massachusetts bill may even 'take [poker] completely out of the gambling genre' and make it legislated as a game of skill."
After watching Phil Ivey burn out at the WSOP last year... I'd say it's both. It's about making the right decision based on what you know, and what ou have. You can't last long in tournament play if you're a sloppy player, and on the reverse, no matter how good you are, if you're drawing crap hands, even if you muscle in with crap cards, it's going to destroy you.
It's also certainly gambling, but it's not the same as blackjack or slots which is entirely a you vs the house, it is a you versus everyone else(the house gets a small cut) situation.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Considering that the biggest gripe of the WSP old-hands is that young players are ruining the game by relying too much on aggressive betting, I would like to argue that it is not nearly as much a game of skill as a lot of people think.
Yes, there's a big gap between someone who doesn't what they're doing and someone who knows the odds, the optimal bet associated with the odds and when someone's bluffing. At the same time, once you get to a certain level, it boils down to whether you get the cards you need. If you don't, you will lose - regardless of how awesome your strategy, card-counting and face-reading is.
So, yes, there's skill in Poker. But you can still do nothing but lose just because you're getting crap cards - or win just because you keep getting awesome cards.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
I mean, seriously, a game of skill is a game where if your skill is superior to your opponent's you win, period. In poker if the deck keeps spitting out cards that favor your opponent you can have all the skill in the world, and you will lose...
-- the cake is a lie
Likewise I suppose, while the 500m sprint is usually a game of skill, theres nothing stopping a meteorite from pummeling you into the clay dirt and losing the race.
It's all a matter of chance really. Albeit, the odds of being dealt a crap hand are pretty high, and being hit by space rock are...
wait for it....
astronomical!
Considering that the biggest gripe of the WSP old-hands is that young players are ruining the game by relying too much on aggressive betting, I would like to argue that it is not nearly as much a game of skill as a lot of people think.
Tournament play is heavily influenced by luck. One bad beat and you're out. End of story.
Cash play, however, is a game of skill. A skilled player brushes off a bad beat, waits out the cold cards, and makes money in the long run. The overly aggressive risk-taker who just won a tournament will lose every penny of his winnings, and then some, if he chooses to sit down at a cash table and see how his playing style works for him in the long run.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
The nature of poker is that it's impossible to create a system that can always win, at least practically. Ultimately it relies on gut feelings, or just whims. This makes me wonder what really goes through the mind of a poker player who's pondering the next move. Most of the time they are not playing a game of skill, but a game of deception, that's why they say things like "You don't play the cards, you play the players".
Thats heads-up live action, and its true that some poker has low variance.
The GP was correct that the old guard of pro tournament players do not like the new situation, and it isnt because they dont have an edge against the young hyper-aggressive crowd.
Its because the hyper aggressive players increase the variance of everyone at the table, including the loose passive players, which is pecisely counter to what benefits the top half of the table (including the *good* hyper-aggressives) the most.
So the old pros still have an edge, but the edge they pick up on Mr. Raise-A-Lot does not cover the edge that they lose on Mr. Call-A-Lot.
Ask any pro-poker player what type of cash money table they like to sit at, and the answer is Loose-Passive. When the game gets overly aggressive, the pros pick up and find a new game to play in thats less dramatic.
"His name was James Damore."
First, tournament poker is only one form of the game and involves higher variance compared to a cash game. But while the outcome of any individual hand or of a single tournament is a combination of luck and skill, long-run outcomes can only differ among individuals on the basis of skill, since the random factors do not favor any particular individual in the long run.
Whether poker is a game of skill or a game of luck depends on the number of hands played. Of course luck has an effect on any individual hand or for that matter on an individual tournament, and a skillful player can have a bad day or a bad month. Over a large enough number of hands though, the good hands and bad hands will be distributed evenly between all players. Therefore, the difference between a successful player and an unsuccessful player is a difference in skill, not a difference in luck. To me, that's a strong enough argument to classify poker as a game of skill.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
There is a luck and a skill side to poker. The luck side keeps the bad players in with their occasional wins, thinking they are good at poker or are overall winners, while the skill side wins money in the long run. The effect of having good or bad cards dealt is described as variance, if you look at a winning poker players profit/loss graph it will be a bumpy road upwards. The individual bumps are short term variance, the overall trend reflects the skill of the player.
How can skill count ? What if you have a middle pair, youre opponent has top pair, and he bets the river. You raise...because you know he's a player that can fold a top pair type hand based on his previous play, and based on your tight image, and based on the cards on the table. He folds the better hand. So its not JUST luck, its strategy and perception of your own image and your opponents playing tendencies.
Skill is also about extracting the maximum amount of value out of your better hands, and FOLDING when you know youre beat.
If you want to read some real poker strategy go to a poker strategy site and browse the theory articles, judging by the discussion here a lot of you will be surprised at the amount of strategy in the game.
And just to answer a previous post by someone, yea phil ivey is (one of) the best poker players, but tournaments are extremly high variance - you need to play a lot of them before you can judge if you are a winning player or not. Cash games are lower variance generally.
You can also lose because you think your opponent has better cards than you/makes bets that are unprofitable to pay off, and win because you make your opponent think you have the best hand/make bets that are unprofitable for him/her to pay off.
That is where skill comes in. If you just deal out the hands and ignore what happens during the hand (i.e. dealing out the entire hand), sure - luck is a factor, but that evens out over a long session.
But making your opponent lay down the best hand, when you can't beat anything - that requires skill. Skill in knowing when to make that bluff, knowing what opponent you can do it against, reading your opponent. And getting paid off when your opponent does similar things also requires skill.
Suppose we are playing Texas Hold'em. Are you really willing to pay off a bet on a board of [Ah, 3h, 6h, 2h, 9d] if you don't have any hearts in your hand (let's say Ad, 7c)? If we're just playing heads up, we know there is a 35% chance that your opponent has a heart in his hand. If the pot is 100 cents, what size bet is it reasonable to pay off? You can only beat any pair smaller than an ace. There are straights (4,5) and flush (any heart) options out there, as well as some slightly questionable two pairs.
Figuring out what price is acceptable for a long term profit requires math skills. And you also need skill to figure out, if you can make a bet that will win you the pot, even if you don't have anything. Suppose you were dealt Tc, 8s in the same situation. It is unlikely that you will win by showdown, as more than 50% of the hands that are possible to be dealt are better than yours. In other words, you can only win the pot by making your opponent lay down his hand.
What kind of bet, if any, would make sense? Should you just muck your cards? Or should you call, because your opponent could have a busted straight draw, like 4,7 (no heart)? You can beat 4,7. Can you make your opponent lay down KQ? KT? TJ? Can you make him lay down AK? After all, if you make a bet, you can make it look like you made the straight or the flush, in which case his pair of aces aren't any good.
Doing the right thing once - luck. Doing it constantly - skill. Yes, you need luck, because you can't just bluff all the time. You are going to get called once in a while, and then you need your cards to hold up. You also need to do the calling from time to time, and you need the cards to be on your side for that.
But there is actually a fairly simple way to demonstrate that skill plays a role. Simply line up some of the best cash game players in the world against people who haven't played the game before. Give them a massive stack of chips (5,000 big blinds should be good), and have them play a huge amount of hands. Let's go with heads-up, 10 pros against 10 new players. 5,000 hands in each match-up. And let's cap the pot sizes to lower the variance/luck factor. Say 100 BB per player. That way you can lose 40 massive pots and still have plenty of play, as you can only lose 10% of your chip-stack.
That'd give us a sample size of 50,000 hands. We can't merely compare the number of hands won - that doesn't really tell the story. You can win 80% of the hands and still come out the loser. But number of hands won, chip stacks, average number of chips won per pot, number of times the worst hand has made the best hand fold etc.
This kind of setup should give a much better picture of the level of skill involved. And to avoid having the rookies throw the game, let's bring in the people who say it's entirely a game of luck for a similar line-up as well. Now we have a sample size of 100,000 hands total. Motivation is a factor as well, but I suspect telling the pros that if they lose, poker will be banned, no exceptions, will be quite a motivator. And let's pay off the non-pros as well ... a prize of say ... 100 US$ for every BB you're ahead after the 5,000 hands.
Now, I doubt it'll end up with the pros having all the money. But I'd be surprised if it was anything lower than 60/40 in their favour.
Poker is a game of incomplete information. You use the information that you do have to draw conclusions and then you make bets based on those conclusions. Good poker players tend to think about poker hands in terms of hand ranges. A hand range is every poker hand that an opponent will take a certain action with. Ideally you'd like to narrow your opponents range down to a single hand because you can then play perfectly against him (it would be very easy to play perfectly against someone who showed you their cards). Unfortunately thats not possible very often as there are 169 non-equivalent poker hands and our opponent is going to play many of them similarly. Each different piece of information that we get from our opponent however allows us to narrow his range and make a better decision. For example if I'm playing in a 9 handed game and someone raises from UTG(stand for under the gun or the first player to act) he is acting with the least amount of information. Therefore he has to player a tighter(better) range of hands. He is more likely to have a premium holding because he made a bet with very little information. If someone were to raise from the button (the last player to act on every street) his range of hands is considerably wider because he has more information with which to make his decisions and can therefore play more hands profitably. Thats a very basic description of hand analysis, but some other information we take into account is our opponents past tendancies, their position, what they perceive our range to be based on the actions that we've taken, and obviously what cards we have and what cards end up coming out of the deck on the flop turn and river.