Good luck.

Thank you, but... luck has very little to do with poker.

Of course luck doesn't relly exist. It is shorthand. You know what I mean when I say it:
I hope you have success.
I hope you read your opponents well.
I hope you start with a good run so as not to eat your bank.

Jeeeze! Can't you just accept "Good Luck". You're bound to hear it again.

Quote Nathan Tyree



I hate it when people say this. Luck has a lot to do with poker. Skill definitely plays a larger roll, but if you continually draw shit cards you're not going to be taking a lot of pots.

It may be true that if I consistently get bad cards, then I will not win very many pots. However, the thing to consider is that we all get the same cards. Over time chance will give each player the same ratio of bad hands to good hands: we all get the same river of cold cards and we all get the same time in the monkey seat.

Where people run in to trouble with this is how they think of the game?s duration. In any given session I may run into trouble due to bad cards, but I?m not playing a game that last for a single session (or several sessions), I?m playing a game that lasts the rest of my life. While a player may have a ?bad run?, over time the distribution of cards will be the same for all players.

The other thing to consider is this: you don?t necessarily need good cards to win. One of my best days ever I made seven times my original buy in in less than two hours without ever holding a premium hand. The table was weak, passive, and too tight. I bullied. I pushed. I made attempts to steal the blinds every time I was in late position.

Chance comes in to play (I don?t much care for the word ?luck? as it has the wrong connotation), but not all that much.
It may be true that if I consistently get bad cards, then I will not win very many pots. However, the thing to consider is that we all get the same cards. Over time chance will give each player the same ratio of bad hands to good hands: we all get the same river of cold cards and we all get the same time in the monkey seat.

Where people run in to trouble with this is how they think of the game?s duration. In any given session I may run into trouble due to bad cards, but I?m not playing a game that last for a single session (or several sessions), I?m playing a game that lasts the rest of my life. While a player may have a ?bad run?, over time the distribution of cards will be the same for all players.

The other thing to consider is this: you don?t necessarily need good cards to win. One of my best days ever I made seven times my original buy in in less than two hours without ever holding a premium hand. The table was weak, passive, and too tight. I bullied. I pushed. I made attempts to steal the blinds every time I was in late position.

Chance comes in to play (I don?t much care for the word ?luck? as it has the wrong connotation), but not all that much.

weird, my post has odd ? marks and seems to have included all of the words twice and David's post seems empty

I wrote a wonderful illustration of why poker is a game of both skill and luck, and Vent trashed it. :(



Oh well.



Here's the abridged version:



Quote Nathan Tyree



This is not fact. This is like saying if a quarter is flipped 1,000,000 times it will come up heads exactly 500,000 times.



You're good hands may come when you're heavy on chips and your opponents are holding bad cards and low on chips. That is good luck. The opposite is bad luck. You have just as good of chance of drawing a shitty pair of cards every hand as you do of getting good ones. The odds reset on each hand, and are not for the long haul.



If I flip a quarter, and it comes up heads, what are the odds it will come up heads on the next flip?



1:1.



If it does come up heads, what are the odds that it will be heads on the next flip?



1:1



Should I ever change my bet to tails? Will it help me?



No.



If I get bad cards, do the odds go up that my next hand will be good?



No.



It's luck that you get good cards when you are in a position to use them. This is a large part of the game. Anybody who doesn't think luck has a lot to do with poker is kidding themselves.



That being said, a skilled player can usually take down an unskilled player. With evenly matched opponents?



It's luck.

Okay, when I said that we all get the same ratio of good cards to bad cards I meant roughly the same. The point is that the odds don?t reset- as you said. And they don?t change from person to person. If you and I both flip a coin a million times we will both get roughly the same percentage of ?tails? outcomes. The percentage will be quite close to 50, by the way. The longer you continue flipping a coin the closer to an exact split between heads and tails you will get (something is wrong with the construction of that sentence, I think). It is true that if we both play 1000 hands of poker we will both draw pocket aces about the same number of times. Those aces are always the best possible starting hand. Yes, the odds of getting a royal flush are 600,000 to 1 against whether you?ve ever had one before or not. If you play 600,001 hands of poker should expect to get one royal flush (you may not, but the odds are with you), but you shouldn?t expect it on any specific hand.

As illustration: I would be willing to make this wager: if I set down and deal 600,001 hands of poker I will deal at least 1 royal flush. However, if I had dealt 600,000 of those hands without dealing a RF, I would not wager money that the next hand dealt would be that RF. Rather, I would make an insurance bet that the next hand would not be the RF. Whereas the odds are good that a RF will appear within 600,001 hands, they are bad that they will appear on any given hand in that run.

I may be digressing here, but it is true that over time any two players who are dealt the same number of poker hands will in fact get roughly the same ratio of good hands to bad hands.

I agree that chance comes into play, but in the end skill is the overwhelming factor.

A skilled player also knows (if I'm not mistaken) that there's a psychological aspect to the game. Bad cards in the hands of a player who knows how to make his opponent think he has good cards can win. Of course, you probably factored such things in to a player's skill level in addition to knowing odds and stuff.

Now don't you wish you had just left it at "thank you"?

yes

In unrelated news, I think I've fixed the issues with the comments...

Quote 2-HeadedGiraffe



True, but he needs the luck of having the chip position to do so.

Quote Nathan Tyree



No, that is not true. You are looking for patterns where none exist. Odds are the mathematical attempt to define what may happen, they are not truth, or fact, or even bankable.



The long odds are in favor of the house on Blackjack and Craps. However, a skilled player can often win against those odds (they still need luck). Any odds based game is victim to chance.



This is why the Casino's prefer slots. They don't operate on odds, but on an overrulling percentage.



By the way, I'll take the opposition on your Royal Flush wager, assuming your talking about a straight draw with no wild cards. I could use the money.

actually, I blew the math a bit there. For a five card game it's closer to 700,000 to 1 against. In a seven card deal the odds become much nicer.


anyway,

You do realize that probabilities are a description of reality, right? If you flip a coin 500 times you will, in fact, have a result that it is somewhere In the neighborhood of half heads, half tails. The longer the run of flips the nearer a perfect 50/50 distribution you will come. It?s easy to try. It works in practice every time.

Maybe my earlier statements weren?t clear. I am not saying that every person who plays cards will get the exact same distribution of hands. I am saying that we can divide all possible starting hands into two sets, which we can call {good hands} and {bad hands}. We can then keep track of every hand we are ever dealt, categorizing each of them into the correct set. After some long period of time (say twenty years) I can then calculate the ratio of hands belonging to the {good hands} set to the hands belonging to the {bad hands} set that I have been dealt. If, over that same period of time you and I played roughly the same number of hands, then at the end of the specified period we could compare results and find them quite similar. That is, we will have had roughly the same distribution of starting hands.

There are some caveats to this: we must have been playing the same game; we must agree on which hands belong in each set; we need to have played nearly the same number of hands. But, given those things, in reality, we will have the outcome described.

This isn?t because the odds cause it, rather the odds are a description of what does happen.

Odds are not a description of what does happen. They are a description of what might happen.



We're in circles now. I will bow out without concession.

okay-


fun while it lasted, though