Comment by schwartzworld
6 hours ago
> NL Holdem poker is absolutely a game of skill with an element of variance aka luck/lack-there-of.
I’ve played a lot of Holdem, and I’m not sure I agree. A lot of what passes for skill is just an innate understanding of the odds.
John Scarne writes about gambling that a good bet isn’t one you are likely to win, but one where the payout is enough to be worth the risk. The best players know the odds of pulling a straight and can do math to figure out if it’s worth chasing one.
Also known as Expected Value (EV), as in, how much is in the pot right now compared to how much you’re betting/calling, usually compared to how likely you are to win a hand using the cards you’re holding.
That works well for limit games, where you can’t bet more than a set amount (in relation to the blinds or the current pot), especially when there are multiple people at the table, and you’re in an advantageous late position so others act before you do.
In high-stakes no-limit heads-up (1v1) play, the cards you’re holding matter less, especially before the flop. EV and pot odds are almost useless except for gauging when to bluff / if you’re being bluffed. Hands rarely end in a showdown as opposed to one of the players folding. The hands that do are essentially coin-flips, with both players holding what they believe are strong hands.
> I’ve played a lot of Holdem, and I’m not sure I agree. A lot of what passes for skill is just an innate understanding of the odds.
"The odds", however, are not simply a function of the cards in your hand and the unknown cards in the deck. There are also the cards in other people's hands, and getting a good read on what they may be based on the person's behavior is absolutely a skill.
It's always entertaining to play poker with 1 friend who is very skilled at a table full of novices. They often get frustrated and crash out due to their read on other people's behavior being miscalibrated to the situation.
> It's always entertaining to play poker with 1 friend who is very skilled at a table full of novices. They often get frustrated and crash out due to their read on other people's behavior being miscalibrated to the situation.
The most frustrating poker game I play is the monthly Saturday Night game with the bros where they're mostly drinking and watching sports, and none of them are very good or play regularly in casinos.
You can usually get a good read on people who are decent-to-good players, playing in a casino. Their bets will generally make sense and tell a believable story (whether or not they are bluffing). You can mostly tell when they are playing ABC poker vs. getting out of line or making moves. People's bet sizing, their approach to pot management, their ranges, their play style, tight vs. loose, passive vs. aggressive, tend to be identifiable. In other words, players tend to act in ways you'd expect from poker players who have played 10,000 hands.
The Saturday Night amateur gang don't play in ways that make sense or are classifiable. You can't tell what their range is, because they don't even know what a range is. Their betting lines don't make sense because they aren't poker players, and often aren't even paying attention to the current hand. You really have to play these kinds of games differently, and/or just relax and consider it a night of drinking and random bingo instead of poker.
I think this is true and why programs like like Pluribus, Libratus and DeepStack have outperformed professionals in both heads-up and multiplayer no-limit Texas Hold'em. It's not reading social cues like traditional players, but just relying on probability. Even when giving perfect knowledge of the computer strategy to humans, they're still unable to exploit.
Humans are improving their game by using solvers and introducing randomness into their decisions. For instance, an optimal strategy given a hand might be "fold 80% of the time". One way to do that in live play is look at the second hand of a watch and fold unless it seconds (in this case) are about 48 (80% prob).
You're not wrong that knowing the odds is a component of the skill, but to suggest that skill in poker stops there is minimizing many of the advanced aspects that require playing at a higher level (information management, assessing a player's likely range, determining the equity of a player's range with cards to come, realizing when your or their range is capped, etc)