Reflections on Luck and Skill from the Part Time Poker Grind

His section on volume rings pretty true. I used to play a lot recreationally. And by "a lot" I mean probably on the medium-to-high side of recreational, but not even close to pro. Like attending every major regional event and attending WSOP every year for 10 years. Both cash and tournaments. I've stopped because of how much of a tiring grind poker is, and how much time you have to dedicate in order to make it financially rewarding. You need to play -a lot- to get good, and then you need to play a lot as a good player to make money. It is really a lot of work.

If you are not a winning poker player (in other words, your long term EV at the table is negative), you're just going to lose money on average, so playing more means losing more. It only makes sense to play in that case if you actually enjoy playing the game and treat your losses as the cost of entertainment.

But if you are a winning poker player, you still won't win enough to rely on the income unless you are playing A LOT. And by a lot I mean every day, for hours a day. And even more if you play online because the level of play is so much stronger online than live.

And then, even if you are a winning player, and you play a lot, AND you have enough average cash flow to make it worth it, you are still going to have periods where variance wipes you out and you're down for months straight. It's pretty brutal.

After all this time, I decided I'd rather get a different hobby than spending so much of my time grinding away in a smoky casino. I just play (infrequent) home games now.

This is why, for earning money, you should participate in positive sum games like the real economy. Poker is worse than 0 sum, its negative sum.

"Poker is a combination of luck and skill. People think mastering the skill is hard, but they're wrong. The trick to poker is mastering the luck. That's philosophy. Understanding luck is philosophy, and there are some people who aren't ever gonna fade it. That's what sets poker apart. And that's what keeps everyone coming back for more." -- Shut Up & Deal

I regularly play in Vegas poker no limit hold’em tournaments, and am substantially positive. These are 12+ hour/day, multi day tournaments, and a bad player with luck just isn’t going to last the grind. 90% of the people in these tournaments have no reason being there. The top 10% are solid, and within that group, it does come down to luck.

I have played a mix of professionally, casually, and semi-professionally for the last ~20 years, in a broad mix of games and formats - while his points on volume are definitely true and not a new concept, the determination I've also come to over the years playing 10k+ tournaments and probably ~1k of those being live - you will never see the long run in the large multi-table format. I have seen horrific losing streaks, insane winning streaks, and soul crushing break even stretches of years with players that are much, much stronger than I am. Most of my big tournament cashes have come down to a few coin flips, any one of them losing would have resulted in a bust.

Smaller tournaments and cash games have much smaller variance and are what I would recommend for anyone trying to make a living for poker - large multi-table tournaments are moonshots and should be treated as such. His points about staking are valid in terms of "diversification" for a poker pro, but TBH, the staking scene is almost uniformly full of degenerates (on the stakee side) and predators (on the staker side). The fundamental problem is that the venn diagram of a winning/good player but also needs a piece of his action bought tends to be an inherently unreliable set of people.

The reason poker is a successful game is because bad players can win. Otherwise why would a person who was bad at the game stake any money at all. Personally I would rather take the luck out of it and attempt to normalize (perhaps by playing duplicate hands) but I imagine it would be quite boring for non poker nerds and therefore non lucrative for everyone.

1. This has many parallels with the concept of Resulting - our tendency to equate the quality of a decision with the quality of its outcome, which was conceptualised in the book Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke, which although a great work, I have to admit I did not finish.

2. Even though the element of chance is inherent to Bridge too, Duplicate Bridge is a clever attempt to nullify the role of luck in tournaments. The same hand is played in different tables (by different teams), and points are scored depending on how you fared in comparison to the other table. So, rather than playing to win, you play to do better than your counterpart in the other table. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duplicate_bridge

For things which have some combination of luck and skill, there tends to be a baseline skill for, average results given no/low skill. So in a thousand person event, you'll have some number of people performing at baseline and a smaller collection that have actually shown up with some skill. Depending on how high the skill floor is and how much variance there is, this often means people performing at baseline don't have any real chance of winning.

But! The variance still matters a lot for the skillful players: their chance of winning is 1/10 instead of 1/1000, and for the baseline folks the chance of winning is basically zero.

Wasn't if Phil who said something to the effect of, "If it wasn't for luck, I'd win every hand!" Which seems pretty much the thesis of this writing (though without the arrogance); ultimately resolving in, process as a better indicator of skill than results, and the best deduction of process in luck skewed results is consistency over time which essentially requires more data to deduce.

decent post.

i used to play tournaments 12-14 hours a day back in the glory days. most important things for me as a MTT (multi table tournament) grinder were discipline, game selection, bankroll management, good note taking, study, volume.

these days i chuckle at how some people are selling 70% of their MTT action at 1.3 markup - thus freerolling. a nice variance killer if you can get away with it / justify it.

grinding life > grinding poker, imo.

> Once you have identified an activity as being more luck than skill driven, a person’s process for the activity starts to become a much stronger signal for whether or not they are actually any good.

This is the central point of the article, and I don't think it's true. If it were as easy as "following a good process", then anyone could get rich investing.

online is getting pretty dicey these days sadly

This is an important topic to me, and I'm glad to see one of the "winners" state plainly how much luck is involved in poker, and by analogy, many other areas of life.

I'd love to see articles like this written by someone who did not win, too. It's too bad that people pay less attention to those stories, as he mentioned in the article (c.f. clickbaity title). At least this is a winner admitting the importance of luck, rather than just saying "do what I did, and you can win too!" [1]

I'm surprised there was no mention of modern machine learning "solvers" for poker, which can get very close to perfect play. The game is not truly solved in the game-theoretic sense, but so close as to make very little difference, as I understand it. Some professional players do strange things like look at the second hand of their watch, as a source of randomness as input to their decision making, since ideal play requires some true randomness in your actions.[2]

So, in addition to the "results-based vs. process-based" angles presented in the article, I'd say there's also a "mathematics-based" consideration. At least for poker, where all the rules are perfectly clear. Harder to apply that to real-life poker-esque situations like founding startups, of course.

[1] As always, relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1827/

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/18/magazine/ai-technology-po... — NYT "How A.I. Conquered Poker" (alt link: https://archive.is/QbXXE)