Foreword

These are three different situations; see if you can tell the difference. This is the final of the World Series of Poker. Player A has bet all his chips on a straight. He goes all-in and waits for his opponent, Player B, to make a decision. Meanwhile, Player B has the nut flush draw and has two cards remaining.

Player B knows that he has only a few potential cards in his deck that improve his hand, and calculates his “hand odds” to be about 4/1. However, if he bets and wins the hand, his pot odds – ie. The number of chips he gets – about 8/1. So, statistically, does he bet and play the favorable odds, or does he fold, wait for another good opportunity, and then avoid gambling altogether?

Here’s our next scenario: It’s a football qualifier for the World Cup. With only a few seconds left, the home team needs to score to win the game and advance to the final, it needs to give it all. Almost on the final kick of the game, the home team striker fired a speculative ball into the opponent’s penalty area, the ball bounced off the goalposts, bounced off the defenders and into the goal. The winning team wildly celebrates their good fortune.

Finally, a gambler in a Las Vegas casino walks up to a roulette table, closes his eyes, and tosses a wad of $100 chips onto number 1. 36, then wait for the ball to come to a stop. The ball hit 36 on time, he picked up his $3,500 bonus and walked away.

So, which of these scenarios are games of skill and which are games of chance?

If you listen to legislators, depending on where you are, football is a sport, poker is a game of skill and chance, and roulette is a game of sheer skill. That’s why football will be played in stadiums, not casinos, poker casinos (in some jurisdictions, no place at all) and roulette casinos.

But why? What role does luck play in these three games, and how much skill really matters in the classic games?

Poker is a game of skill

Let’s start with poker, which is the most hotly debated game of skill versus gambling elements of any game. The ongoing battle to make poker a game of skill in the United States and elsewhere is key to its freedom from strict gambling laws in casinos.

While poker is growing in popularity worldwide, more and more “skilled” players are making big money playing the game. In fact, some judges in places like Russia have come to view poker as a game of skill.

Essentially, a distinction must be made between the skill used in poker and the pure gambling used in casino games such as roulette. As the saying goes, for casual poker players, poker is 30% skill and 70% luck, while for pros, the numbers are reversed.

Poker is so popular right now that many players think they attribute their skill to the game, so much so that they sometimes overlook the fact that any luck is involved in the game.

Look at the number of “bad beat” stories that flood online forums, and then look at how many players stop and ask themselves what kind of game they’re involved in. It’s likely that few would attribute their bad beat to the fact that they’re playing what is essentially a game that involves a lot of luck.

Constant winners, constant tricks

In a 2011 article by Steven D. Levitt and Thomas J. Miles titled The Role of Skill versus Luck in Poker: Evidence from the World Series of Poker, which analyzed a group of players from the 2010 World Series Poker for highly skilled poker players. The average return on investment (ROI) for this group of players was over 30%, compared to -15% for all other players in the tournament.

If poker is a game of pure luck, as many jurisdictions around the world have speculated, why do the best players in the world always make it to the final table in major tournaments?

As we saw in the first example, calculating odds does play a role in poker – after all, a large part of poker is based on flops – and there are many other elements in the game that poker never Truly viewed as a game of chance.

While every winner in poker has to have a loser — those buy-ins have to go somewhere — using skill in poker allows a top player to override the luck factor, so he’ll outplay a bunch of players, or lose a A lot, lose a little, or break even.

Football – a game of chance?

Let’s go back to our football analogy. Tom Tango, author of The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball, suggests that luck actually plays a bigger role in sports outcomes than you might expect if you only consider games won or lost by teams (a draw would overcomplicate the calculations). .

In fact, when Tango’s calculations were applied to a typical 10-month season of football, luck contributed about 35% of the variance in outcomes (luck), leaving about 65% attributable to talent. That’s good news for skilled soccer players, because talent is roughly twice as likely to affect a team’s winning percentage as luck is.

However, this still means that about one-third of the team’s win rate depends entirely on random probability. If that’s true, why isn’t football considered a game of chance like poker?

Casino favorite game

At the end of the day, some games are all about luck and no system will work in the long run.

Play roulette or video slot machines. Play wisely and choose the most conservative odds, both games can net you a few good wins in the short term, but play long enough and are likely to lose you.

It’s no surprise that brick-and-mortar casinos will cram their floor space with the most lucrative games. Per square meter, roulette and slot machines “earn” casinos far more than poker tables.

This is for good reason – the chances of winning in these games are much lower than in a skill-based game like poker, where you have to bring at least some knowledge to the table – even blackjack, which offers players More favorable house edge than its table game competitors. And that’s not even taking into account the casino-biased roulette or the house edge of blackjack. Gamblers don’t just have to win the chance, they also have to win the casino’s own odds.

Gambler’s fallacy

The gambler’s fallacy, also known as the Monte Carlo fallacy, is the false belief that if something happens more often than normal in a certain period, it will happen less in the future, presumably as a A means of balancing nature.

This fallacy can occur in many practical situations, and although it is closely related to gambling, such errors are common among players. The problem, however, is that this is completely wrong.

The most famous example is a game of roulette (hence the name) played in the Casino Monte Carlo in 1913, when the ball landed 26 times in a row on black. Gamblers lost millions betting on black, wrongly thinking that red’s long winning streak had expired.

Las Vegas: by luck

This fallacy persists to this day. Visit any casino and you’ll see gamblers frantically scribbling previous numbers on a slip of paper, or frantically searching the casino number board showing the last dozen numbers, as if “chance” knew it happened before What, and will somehow correct the balance at some point.

If that were the case, Las Vegas wouldn’t have billion-dollar casinos, 20-story hotels and penthouse suites. All the gamblers who believed this fallacy helped pay for the suites.

Everyone needs a system

Beyond “don’t play,” every gambler needs a system to overcome any variance or luck that inevitably comes with sitting at the table.

The infamous Martingale system, played by every gambler at some point (hopefully before, in the general direction of the trash), works like this:

Let’s say you bet $5 on red at a roulette table and you lose. On the next spin, you double your bet to $10, and keep betting until you win. Therefore, your first win will help cover all your previous losses and bring you a profit equal to your initial bet.

The system sounds good, except for one small problem: most gamblers, unless you’re a Russian oil tycoon, have limited funds and will inevitably go broke before the system comes to fruition. In conclusion, casinos usually have a stop button for losing gamblers: if you lose too much, they pull the plug.

Where the casino system breaks down?

At most (if not all) roulette tables around the world there will be table limits – once the maximum bet is reached, you can no longer increase your bet. The maximum bet varies, but is usually between 500 and 5,000 times the minimum bet. This means that you cannot exceed 13 losing spins, even at the upper limit of the table limit.

Look at that 20-story Vegas hotel — it’s living proof that the roulette system doesn’t work.

How do you overcome the luck factor?

So, can the system work in gambling games?Even in a game with a healthy element of skill like poker, all players go through a bad turn and go bust – luck may not befall a player, even if they make sound betting decisions.

So how do gamblers look beyond the chance factor? For a casino game that relies so heavily on luck, the simple answer is not to play at all. Well, this is a bit simplistic, but simple bankroll management is the recipe for long-term success in any game that involves the odds. When you’re ahead, keep a tight grip on your bankroll and the percentage of your winnings in the bank, and only make sound ABC decisions.

Take advantage of bookmakers

Even good sports betting professionals bet on even (1/1) or odds outcomes and avoid accumulators and crazy bets such as score predictions that appeal to casual gamblers. There’s a reason bookmakers advertise the odds of a striker scoring a hat-trick in football – because their odds of doing so, especially when they’re out of form, are much lower than the odds the bookmaker is quoting.

Sports betting sites and bookmakers misrepresent the “true” odds of anything happening (i.e. the true odds of someone scoring the first goal in a football match are usually much higher than the usual 6/1 or 7/1), But when you gamble you’re not just luck itself, you’re also taking on the house.

But CUHK, if you hit that “long shot” and beat the dealer, you will win the prize. Hit six numbers in the lotto, or hit a mere dollar jackpot, and those astronomical odds will be hit. This is the ultimate lure – bet small, win big, and then spend the rest of your life drinking luck “cheat” champagne on a luxury yacht – and a house.

Can we avoid luck?

Luck or chance is inherent in everything we do. Getting hit by a car, winning the lottery or being struck by lightning – all of these involve chance and, like in gambling, it’s all about luck.

So stick to games with a house edge or games of skill/gambling like poker and learn, practice the system, run errands, and get the odds in your favour. Or give up gambling altogether. It’s really not attractive, is it?