Is poker a skill game or a game of chance?
Researchers claimed last week that they had created a nearly unbeatable poker-playing computer program.
What does this mean for the age-old debate over whether poker is a game of skill or chance?
TÌM HIỂU THÊM :
Poker, as a spectator sport, isn't always the most exciting thing to watch.
I realized this a few years ago while staying at the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas.
I was there with a friend for a couple of days and, being a poker fan, thought it would be fun to check out a high stakes game there.
It wasn't the case.
Nothing happens - you see a lot of people wearing sunglasses in a windowless room, some cards and chips moving around a table, and every now and then someone being banished with a sullen expression on their face because they no longer have any chips in front of them.
Watching poker in person is tedious.
Despite this, televised poker was popular.
The North American National Hockey League then went on strike in 2004 due to a pay dispute between the players' union and league officials.
Because the season was canceled, 1,230 games were not played – and, more importantly, they were not broadcast on television.
Networks were left with a fairly large gap in their schedules that needed to be filled quickly, and tournament poker, according to Marvyn Ryder, a professor specializing in sports marketing at McMaster University, filled that void.
With the increase in televised tournaments came an increase in the popularity of poker websites.
As a result, legal questions arose regarding whether it should be classified as a game of chance or a game of skill.
As the debate demonstrated, this was not a new issue.
In 2012, I published an article in the Journal of Gambling Studies arguing that poker isn't the game of skill that many players believe it to be.
In the experiment, 300 people were divided into "expert" and "non-expert" groups based on whether they were interested in the game or not.
Then they played 60 hands of Texas Hold'em with fixed deals so that players could consistently get good, bad, or neutral hands.
In a nutshell, the researchers discovered that there was little difference in the final amounts of money earned by experts versus non-experts, implying that skill level had little effect on the outcome.
In other words, they contended, poker is a game.
As I and others pointed out at the time, the paper had some methodological issues.
The authors seemed to overlook what is perhaps the most important aspect of poker – the human element.
I discovered this firsthand a few years ago, when I really got into the theory of poker and how to figure out what the best plays would be in various situations.
A lot of it comes down to reading the other players at the table – do they play conservatively or loosely?
Do they "bully" the pot, or do they only place small bets?
If you play with someone long enough, you can develop a profile of them, which can help you decide when to play with them.
Another issue was that poker was almost never played as a short-term game.
Anyone who has had even a semi-serious attempt at making money from poker knows that if you want to make actual money playing poker, it won't happen in 60 hands.
Nobody knows how many hands you have to play to become an expert, but some players report playing anywhere from 200 to 10,000 hands per day.
To put it another way, if you want to be a great poker player, it will take a long time.
Except if you're a computer, which will take about two months.
A study published in Science last week described a new computer algorithm called counterfactual regret.
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