Taken to task by poker players after he implied theirs is a game in which luck outweighs skill, Tom Chivers found himself challenged to go head to head in a London casino
Poker is taking over the world. Its top players are superstars; tens of millions of people play online every week, and fans watch tournaments as though they’re the Premier League. But is it a game of skill, or luck? Recently, I was given the opportunity to find out. Sort of.
A few months ago, I wrote a piece for this paper about the game. A piece of research published in a scientific journal suggested that it involved less skill than its players believed, and I wrote about it, using it as an excuse to talk about luck and randomness in the wider world: in the stock market, in sports, in political life. Understandably, though, the focus on poker made a few players quite angry. People pointed out flaws with the research – it only looked at people’s performance over 60 hands, not over the thousands that a pro player would play over a year; it didn’t explain how some people consistently made money over years.
A couple of people I quoted in the piece pointed out two simple ways you could tell a game of skill from a game of chance: one, whether you can lose on purpose, and two, whether success in the past predicts success in the future. It might surprise you to learn that neither of those apply strongly in the stock market, which really is largely luck – but both are true in poker. I’d tried to make that clear, but understandably, poker players saw the top line about randomness in poker and thought I was attacking their beloved game. So the guys at the Grosvenor Victoria Casino, on London’s Edgware Road, got in touch. Would I like to play one of their resident professional players, and see just how much skill there really is? Would I like, in short, to have my backside handed to me by someone who knew how to play?
Of course, I knew that one game would prove nothing. If the pro beat me, it wouldn’t show that there was skill; if I won, it wouldn’t show there wasn’t. A single data point can’t show a trend. But, what the heck, I thought: it’s a free game of poker and I might get a few drinks out of it. So along I went, to play a chap called Ken Wong.
Poker has exploded in popularity in recent years. The internet has brought it out of dark smoky rooms of dubious legality, and into people’s homes; hugely popular global tournaments, such as the World Series of Poker (WSOP), have made its best players star names. And a large number of people have started making careers out of it. That alone, of course, proves that it’s not purely luck; if it were, it would be impossible consistently to make money, as it is impossible in roulette. But what is interesting is who is making that money.
According to Nathan, the dealer at the table Ken and I were playing at, the demographics of poker have changed. Once it was largely older guys who had played in casinos all their lives. Since the mid-2000s, said Nathan, they had become outnumbered by twentysomethings with maths degrees, who had started their careers on the internet. What you might call the classical poker skills – reading your opponent’s body language, looking for “tells” – still have a role, but have taken a back seat to numeracy: knowing your odds, using statistical reasoning to estimate your opponent’s hand, and throwing an element of randomness into your game to make your own behaviour unpredictable.
Nate Silver, the poster-boy of the new class of statistical political pundits and author of The Signal and the Noise: the Art and Science of Prediction, who correctly predicted the US presidential election result, was one of them. He got into the game about eight years ago, and was able to make six-figure profits for two years simply by playing the percentages: the poker boom brought with it so many unskilled players, “fish”, that even half-decent internet players could make large amounts of money.
In his book he defends poker as a game of great skill – but also a game of vast amounts of luck. We think of the two as polar opposites, but in fact they’re separate, if related. Noughts and crosses, he says, is a game of no luck, but not much skill either. Chess is a game of great skill and no luck. Roulette is a game of lots of luck and no skill, and poker is a game requiring huge amounts of both.
In fact, there’s so much luck that the skill is obscured. Silver imagines a skilled player who, on average, would win $200 for every 100 hands she plays (at $200 “limit hold ’em” poker, specifically), and who plays 60,000 hands in a year. While her average yearly earnings would be around $100,000, poker’s unpredictability is such that even as good a player as that is far from guaranteed to make money: Silver’s projection is that she would, more than one time in 10, make a significant loss, perhaps thousands of dollars. Conversely, someone who makes $30,000 in his first 10,000 hands is still more likely than not to be a long-term loser. A huge amount of the skill in poker involves not underestimating the luck.
This is why you need to play thousands of hands for the skill in poker to start to win out over the luck, the signal (as Silver would put it) to drown out the noise. And that’s why my playing a pro in a one-off shows very little: in a straight head-to-head, even the most idiotic “fish” would have a decent shot at beating the best player in the world. Todd Simkin, a financial trader who uses poker to teach probability and strategy, says that he doesn’t start to look at a player’s outcomes until they’ve played 100 hours at least, and “even then we don’t feel that we have a good handle on truth”. It’s probably fair to say that if you think you can tell from one game whether you’re any good, then you’re not any good. That, in turn, is why I got such a different reaction from my friends, who might play four times a year, compared to the casino staff. “Of course it’s luck,” my friends said. “Of course it’s skill,” said Nathan the dealer, withering disdain in his voice. It’s both – but the skill only becomes a major factor if you play thousands of hands. If you win a single hand, it’s meaningless to attribute it to skill. If you’re in profit after 100,000 hands, you can say with reasonable confidence that you’re a skilled player.
At the table, of course, it feels different. Up against Ken in the casino, my aggressive play – pushing large amounts of money in early, whenever I got a halfway decent hand and sometimes when I didn’t, in an effort to throw Ken off balance – felt cunning, powerful. Every time I bullied him into folding, or took the money when the cards were shown, I felt prescient, as though it had been inevitable that I would win. Ken played more cautiously, waiting for me to make a mistake. Soon, flushed with overconfidence and free beer, I did, and Ken pulled ahead of me.
But fortune is fickle. I went in foolishly heavy on a mediocre hand, and Ken, sensibly, followed me. But I got the cards I needed. Then, on a big pot, I drew a full house on the last card, again when Ken was favourite. Suddenly he was almost out of chips. One last burst of luck fell my way: as he drew an ace-queen in his hand, and threw the last of his stack on it, I drew an ace-king. I’d won.
As I was leaving, crisp fifties tucked into my wallet, one of the casino’s staff, a young man named Tom, spoke to me. “Does this mean you’re going to write that there really is no skill in poker?” he asked, apparently concerned that their PR stunt had backfired. I wanted to reassure him: one game of poker can tell us nothing at all. If I played Ken 100 times, I am supremely confident he would walk away with all my money and the keys to my flat. But on a one-off, I had a puncher’s chance.
I didn’t say that, of course. I brushed a little imaginary dust off each shoulder, and beamed. “Oh, I know there’s skill in poker,” I said. “It just turns out that most of it belongs to me.”
Tom Chivers 