Reflections on Luck and Skill from the Part Time Poker Grind(thehobbyist.substack.com) |
Reflections on Luck and Skill from the Part Time Poker Grind(thehobbyist.substack.com) |
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.
I've come to believe the real reason people shouldn't pursue these kinds of sports or games professionally unless they're born with a deep thirst for winning them is twofold. First, if you love it from day one, the chances that you're actually better than average are higher than they would be for a randomly selected person in the population (e.g. Nike CEO Phil Knight really was able to run a 4-minute mile in college).
But second, deeply enjoying the game makes the requisite 10 (20, 50, 100) thousand hours you need to become a true pro go much faster than for someone who's just putting in the reps, and it even gives you drive to do related things in the likely case that that doesn't pan out (e.g., Nike CEO Phil Knight did not become an Olympian after college, he instead sold Japanese shoes out of his car for half a decade or so as a side hustle to track and field meets across the country while working a day job).
First, spending 10 1-hour session produces way less pro-ness than spending 1 10-hour session. Every programmer who attempts a difficult (pro) project can probably attest to this.
Second, not all X hours/days produce the same pro-ness. People have plateaus that seem to stuck somewhere. But you need those plateau X hours/days too. I have a theory that one can avoid as much plateau as possible by always challenging oneself with an almost impossible -- yet still doable project. But it's difficult to get right, so a lot of people get a very long plateau, or burnout, and then quit.
PS: So eventually, anyone who is serious about a career must spend his hours efficiently on high quality (aligned to the career path, while challenging, but not impossible) projects.
PS2: The freedom to spend one's time is absolutely important. Marriage and children could bring havoc to this freedom so people should think carefully before treading into the water.
Fact is, a lot of top players also have deals on the side, with brands and ambassador things. I feel you need those deals to make up for the bad runs.
I love the game, but the variance can inflate egos and the grind makes other hobbies more attractive.
That's a good point, too, one I failed to mention. A lot of people are losing poker players, but they don't know it. They don't keep records, and they don't manage and analyze their bankroll over time. A losing poker player has a negative EV. If you buy in to 20 $1000 tournaments, bink one of them for $15K, you're on top of the world, but guess what, you're a losing poker player. Cash players are even worse. They donk off $500 a night but only remember that time last week when they were up $5000 and cashed out. Congratulations, but your EV is still negative.
By my own measure, I was a losing poker player for most of my years playing the game, and I have a spreadsheet to prove it.
I hear this often about investing: people get started (losing money) with grossly insufficient education and they do learn for a few years, then give up, move on and blame it on "the professionals" or "science shows". When the fact is, if you start investing and learning at the same time, most likely you will underperform everyone else for a while. It's not because you were stupid; it's not because of "the professionals"; it's that you didn't know. It's an important distinction, and the equally losing opposite of "sunk costs".
In a way you can consider poker 0 sum or positive sum depending on the utility you derive from the enjoyment of gambling. But that should also factor in the negative utility from gamblers that lose
I feel there are multiple notions of "luck" in common use and the ambiguous term leads to misunderstandings.
In my mind, the purest form of luck is, by definition, not something that can be mastered. It is 100% beyond one's control to influence. Examples might include: your genetics, flipping a fair coin, etc.
But lots of people talk about "luck" as though it's something that somehow one take advantage of in a willful way. They say "make your own luck." Or perhaps "put yourself in situations where you're more likely get lucky." Or maybe "master luck"?
That's all fine, and is a worthwhile topic, but I would call that "skill". Maximizing one's odds of something (even something involving luck) is a skill.
Perhaps by "mastering luck" they mean not allowing it to psych you out — even if you're on a long losing streak, even while doing everything right. But again, I'd say saying level-headed is a straightforward skill (difficult though it may be).
Anyway, that's my little rant on the ambiguity of the term "luck" (:
I'm not a professional player but I have observed in more than a trivial amount of occurences there are sharks in casinos picking the right cash table to maximize returns. They seem to know each other and don't play against each other, but always try to pick a table of fishes. I don't know if I'm thinking too much though.
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.
This includes 'soft skills' like body-language reads, speech-play, false-representation, baiting players into non-optimal play, as well as the underlying mathematical basis.
The luck element - known elsewhere as RNG Jesus - is mitigated completely over 10,000 hands by appropriately skilled players. There's a reason the composition of the final tables of the WSOP can be so static year on year, multiple bracelet winners wouldn't be a thing otherwise .
A fully optimised 'safe' player can be beaten both short-term and long-term live by a player who is skilled in reading tells, or simply bluffing. The BBV may be different, but the concept of a 'hero fold' exists for a reason - and is often more satisfying than a 'hero call' to veteran players.
What I said was 100% correct and didn’t need a bunch of extra unrelated stuff.
I’m making a fundamental point about randomness and poker which you are failing to understand. Stop and try to understand for a second instead of launching into mansplaining.
Then you should play Chess, or some other perfect information game. There are popular games that don't involve luck.
There's something called "match poker" which does exactly that.
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
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.
Not op, but I think you’re right… it’s probably 1000x or infinity depending on how you look at it.
The ev of the median player in a typical tournament is negative, while the pro is positive. As a measure of skill, that metric can’t really be expressed as a multiple.
As for skill level, I think a prob being 100x a rec is probably about right — most people have no idea how much better pros are than they are.
That said, poker sustains interest from recs precisely because the format leans more towards the luck side of the luck-skill continuum than complete information games like chess or go.
So a rec can play head up against a top pro like Phil Ivey and can still win, but that victory would be a function of luck rather than skill. Iterate that spot 100x or 1000x, and the rec doesn’t win very often.
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.
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.
There are also certainly other ways to have an edge in investing (quant firms come to mind), but I think the most realistic option for "anyone" is readily available in the form of low fee index funds and a long time horizon.
https://youtu.be/H5jPJQ5cVGU?si=KoXd4H3FOkLZ1y06 has an interesting counter-point. You need to fuel your returns with savings.
I guess it's a subtlety — in the end, since you said "for decades", and if you adjusted your wording sightly (such as "help you reach your financial goals", instead of "get rich"), the underlying message is similar. But I figured I'd share the link in case you find it interesting.
Yes, all of those things.
There are teams at the same table all working together by communicating with each other about what hands they have. The sucker at the table is the one not part of that team.
Also, it’s software, which means it can be written to favor the house.
Online gambling for real money is the equivalent of just setting your money on fire.
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)
so i think there is a chance that the quoted person would agree with your comment here, as I think it is orthogonal to the quote
Luck follows (or at least positively correlates) with skill :) 30+ years ago in our company of friends in the university dormitories we had a guy who had the card deck handling skills of a major illusionist (and those skills were naturally a source of significant income for him). The guy was also tremendously lucky - well beside mere being alive and without broken bones while applying his skills for income :) - in particular once he won an amount enough to buy 1-bdrm apt in St.Petersburg back then on a scratch lottery ticket that he bought at a random place on our way while we were walking to some business meeting in a city that we just arrived that morning. If it were a skillful illusion, then it was way beyond anything i've heard or seen before :)
Poker is a mathematical game with mathematically fixed odds. Real life is different in that there is a considerable amount of room to tilt the odds in one's favor.
For an obvious way to tilt odds in your favor, stay in school and learn what you're being taught.
Agreed with you there (:
And generally, doing what you (ethically) can to give yourself a leg up is great. But I find that approach/attitude can get dicey when it is then used to cast judgement on other people (I'm not saying you were, just going on a tangent here). Acknowledging the sometimes-overwhelming effects of luck on a person's life, despite their best efforts, has helped me be more empathetic, I think.
If someone is down-and-out, maybe they were lazy or wasted their opportunities, but maybe they didn't, and they just got waylaid by misfortune. Keeping that in mind helps me hold back from shouting at them to "pull yourself up by your bootstraps!" or such. That may be helpful in the former case, but can be hurtful in the latter.
"Get rich" is definitely too broad of a target and probably has too many connotations with "mansion and luxury cars" when, as you identified, what I meant with that statement is closer to "financial goals" or, more tangibly, something like "comfortable retirement".
Way ahead of you, I moved to Europe as a precondition of my getting married. cries in TC
Citation/Any evidence would be great, but I won't hold my breath.
It doesn't require advanced studies to realize this, just learn from mistakes of others. Even if 1 in 1000 wins (for now), its a losing game for any honest folks. Scammers prey on simple and powerful addiction and little else, games can be easily rigged in ways you will never realize just as parent describes.
The variance in poker is extremely high, allowing long-term losing players to often have winning sessions in cash games, and to (often enough) cash and even win tournaments.
After the entry ticket is purchased (ie, not subtracting it's cost in your EV calculation), the long-term losing rec still has positive expectation in a tournament. So does the pro. EV_pro <<< 100 * EV_rec. This will be true even if the pro is Phil Ivey. Any professional poker player would much, much rather take, say, 50% of the combined winnings of 100 random recs in the WSOP main event than 50% of Ivey, assuming both were offered at the same price.
ROI is a standard metric for measuring MTT success. Pros are typically positive, recs are typically negative.
Flipping the metric to EV after buy in strikes me as a straw man, but I will roll with it…
I am fairly certain that I would take action on the results of a basket of 100 mtt pros being 100x greater than the results of a basket of 100 mtt recs in the wsop ME. Like I said, I’m pretty sure that would be closer to 1000x, since the vast majority of the recs will not cash, while the pros are much more likely to cash and run deep. I think this is a decent proxy for roi. If you’re interested, I will be happy to negotiate terms and have a mutually agreed upon escrow-holder for a bet next year.
I agree with your comment that there is a lot of variance in poker, but that variance can be mitigated quite a bit via skill except in “short stack” MTTs that devolve into shovefests relatively early.
That, as you said, makes it trivially true that the pros are infinitely better than the recs. By that metric it doesn't even make sense to have the conversation. The original comment I responded to was: "their chance of winning is 1/10 instead of 1/1000". My thought experiment, far from being a straw man, simply extends that idea from "winning" to "amount made in cashes."
> I am fairly certain that I would take action on the results of a basket of 100 mtt pros being 100x greater than the results of a basket of 100 mtt recs in the wsop ME.
Very unlikely. To give a sense, based on payout structure this year if even a single rec makes the final table (at least one did) that alone puts the number to beat at a minimum of 100M (9th place prize = 1M)... and first is 10M.
> but that variance can be mitigated quite a bit via skill except in “short stack” MTTs that devolve into shovefests relatively early.
No, even deep stack tourneys are still really, really short compared with anything like a "long run" sample. Jonathan Little, the pro who own https://pokercoaching.com/ and has millions in tournament earnings, once went 50 tournaments without even cashing, let alone winning. Daniel Negreanu, arguably one of the best tournament players of all time, recently had a 2 million dollar losing year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nu-QqzikpWU.
> I will be happy to negotiate terms and have a mutually agreed upon escrow-holder for a bet next year.
I will absolutely take that bet, but you'd need to define some way to select what counts as the pool of pros and the pool of recs. Alternatively -- this wouldn't be a bet but a way to test the theory -- look at the list of everyone who cashed this year and cross reference it with Hendon Mob db or something similar... and define a pro as someone who's had lifetime winners of 300K+ or something. You'd need to control for the number of pros among the entrants as well, but if you're right you'd see the pros represented at 100x their entry proportion in their cashes proportion (that's very rough and doesn't account for size of cash, but it should be an easy enough experiment to do if you want to see that I am correct).
Please take your reductive misandry elsewhere. It's impressing no one.
Here is a suggestion. Read the comment the other person states and then engage with it instead of attempting to use it as a jumping off point for your post.
And btw, luck does not disappear over 10k hands. The final table at the wsop has not been static.
Since 2000 when hold’em poker became popular nobody has repeated back to back wins. If it was a game of skill we would expect the best player to keep winning.
As for your contention regarding the modern era, I simply answer 'Phil Hellmuth' with his 154 WSOP cashes 64 WSOP final tables. Negreanu, Ferguson and Seidel all have 40+ WSOP final tables. Hellmuth also has 17 bracelets to Ivey's 11.
Sometimes, you make your own luck...
I get the sense that you are dismissing the value of entertainment in this exchange.
Many of the donators in a given player pool know that they are losers and have a rough budget of what they are willing to lose. They engage in the exchange because they value the entertainment.
I personally see poker games as a transfer of wealth from worse players to better players, with the house taking a cut for creating the market. At higher stakes where most solid pros play, this rake is a small percentage of the wealth transfer.
Note that for many of the losing players, substitute activities for poker are gambling in the pit and/or sports betting. Are these also not part of the economy? What about movies, concerts, and TV? There is value in creating experiences instead of creating things, and poker is an experience that some people like.
To be fair, one of the things that poker is good at is letting people believe they are winners when they are not — this facilitation self-delusion sometimes makes for a bad look. That said, the bank account doesn’t lie, and I’ve seen plenty of avid poker players quit or drop stakes dramatically while choosing a different hobby or form of entertainment.
edit: The economy being positive sum has nothing to do with the way wealth is distributed.
Compare this to something like trading apples and oranges, where one person gets an orange (maybe they are tired of apples) and the other gets an apple (maybe they are tired of oranges). Both gets something they want in exchange for something they don't want.
Income inequality does not imply zero-sum.
Even in live games they use poker solvers in between breaks to optimise your playing potential and reduce the range of 'playable hands'.
Also it's laughable to suggest that playing optimally is "just the given" in MTTs, which are arguably the softest format available where almost nobody in a given field is playing anywhere close to optimal. And even more laughable to suggest that modern bots are akin to players adhering to SuperSystem, a poker strategy book written nearly 50 years ago which was already extremely outdated before the advent of solvers 10 years ago.
As for unethical, things like PioSolver, MonkerSolver, and PokerSnowie are basically de facto standard for play at high level online - and are absolutely used at breaktimes in live play. Then you have people multi-monitoring, or running GTOWizard in a VM, as a given.
You're basically claiming that all bots in action are Pluribus style, which is just nonsense. I bring up SuperSystem since its the earliest reference I can think of by a Pro to the concept of range advantage.
The modern poker sites basically just teach game theory optimal... which ends up with people running GTOWizard as a given. The best bots I've seen that avoid detection are basically doing some variant of the strategies outlined in modern guides like RIOs From the Ground Up.
And even if bots are imperfect, people and especially recreational players, don't sign up to real money poker sites to play against bots. Everyone knows intuitively they're at a massive disadvantage over a bot that can execute any strategy perfectly ad infinitum, even if the strategy itself is imperfect.
If you're going to be cheating scum, just own up to the fact that you're a bad guy; don't make intellectually dishonest justifications for it.
https://ftw.usatoday.com/2024/07/wsop-controversy-poker-solv...
Bryan Paris - "“Having this extra feedback between hands is helpful but a far cry from the automation of the game. Even with this feedback, Tamayo very much earned his victory,”
Tamako - "Joe and Dom actually helped. If they weren’t here, I likely do not win this tournament.”
As for the rest, I personally accept the imperfect world and play RTA-less - I'm not a naive child throwing slurs about because I can't accept the world has moved on.
{Example of an Upswing Couch and Pro who previously played online 6-max for a living, and his incredulity due to hilarious RTA in a live televised tournament) https://www.reddit.com/r/poker/comments/1ebi5aq/do_you_want_...
Literally nobody respectable in the poker world argues that you should be able farm human opponents with bots, regardless of how close to optimal the bots are programmed to play. Except you, I guess.