History of Poker

Mr. Jinx and Miss Lucy, they jumped in the lake.

- Bob Dylan


According to the PokerStars website, a deck of 52 cards can be shuffled into 80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,404,000,000,000,000,000 sequences. Among them we'll find every last combination of holecards, burn cards, flops, turns, sixth streets, and rivers. Players tend to be furious when, with all of these possible variations, they're dealt a dozen hands in a row that are more or less the same, without a single card higher than 7, for example – unless they're playing lowball, of course, in which case they're thrilled. The length of this number also has a lot to do with why the winner of the World Series of Poker main event is no longer thought of as poker's best player. When the cards are well-shuffled, the laws of randomness will produce wildly unpredictable results on a regular basis. And the larger the field, the unlikelier it becomes that the best player in any tournament will win it.



Serious players are at war with the shuffle. Many of them prefer no-limit or pot-limit games because big-bet poker gives them more leverage to win pots without the best hand. Other strong players prefer a mixed limit game such as H.O.R.S.E., in which the money usually goes to those who make a series of small, correct decisions over a number of hours or days. Among high-stakes professionals, the $50,000 H.O.R.S.E. event at the WSOP has become the gold standard of tournaments. But the very best players, of course, do well in both kinds of games.



In my column "Fooled by Randomness," I noted how much luck is necessary to win a no-limit hold'em tournament, especially now that the fields routinely top 1,000 players. A high degree of skill is required to play these tournaments profitably month after month, but it's also true that a large and growing percentage of players are skillful enough to win if their timing is exquisite. Skill remains the major determinant, but the luck factor – especially lost coin flips or bad timing in a few key hands late in the tournament – prevents the most skillful players from finishing first as often as they do in golf, bridge, or Scrabble.



One of the most convincing arguments that both live and tournament poker are contests in which a preponderance of skill determines the outcome has been made by David Sklansky, Howard Lederer, and Annie Duke, among others. Their point is fairly simple: You cannot intentionally lose at games of chance such as bingo, lotteries, craps, or roulette, but a poker player can easily lose on purpose if he wants to. Lederer often adds that when so many pots are won without a showdown, it is clearly the bettor's skill in deciding when and how much to wager that determines the outcome of those hands.



After a lifetime of poker on three continents, Herbert O. Yardley wrote, "I do not believe in luck – only in the immutable law of averages." To get a sense of what contemporary players think, I surveyed about 200 of them on the issue of skill versus luck. Here are a few of the more interesting comments.



High-stakes cash player Brian Townsend echoes Yardley. "I don't believe in luck. It's all mathematics," he says. "Everybody runs the same. I believe in taking personal responsibility for my play. I see too many posts in which people say they run bad or are unlucky. I believe that you make your own results, and that everything comes down to your decisions. No one else is in control but yourself. People think that the cards have a role in the results, and they do in the short run, but in the long run, it'll all even out. If your results aren't good, it's most likely because you're not playing well."



Crandall Addington insists that luck is not a major factor in no-limit hold'em "if you include cash games in the generalizations about luck and randomness. Yes, randomness has become a major factor in the no-limit hold'em tournaments televised today, which is an aberration of the pure form of the game. But that is not true, nor has it ever been, in the pure form of the game – i.e., the cash game." He notes that he and several of his old road-gambling cohorts "never had a losing year as we played throughout the country. Those were cash games in which Lady Luck occasionally found a seat at the table, but for the most part she was barred from the games. Although I cannot express an opinion about the skills of some of today's younger professionals in cash games, since I have not played with them, I notice that some of them struggle in the $100,000 change-in cash no-limit hold'em that is currently televised. Quite a different game from tournament poker."



Peter Alson: "Tournaments are more luck-dependent than cash games for the simple reason that the blinds keep increasing, which forces one to commit chips with perhaps only a very small edge or no edge at all. If the blinds did not increase, tournament poker would be very similar to live play in terms of luck, except for the rebuy factor, which favors live play. One more thing: People talk about the long run. I think most of the mathematicians out there will agree that the long run can be a very long time, and that while things will usually even out, this is not always the case. Although luck will average out as a whole amongst the poker-playing population, there are individuals who will be unlucky for life and others who will be lucky for life. If you are very skilled but luck goes against you over the course of a lifetime, you might still be a winning player, just not as much of one as you might have been if luck had broken even or slightly favored you. In every bell curve, there will be losers and winners in the distribution of luck."



Barny Boatman: "I think you'll find that there is an inversely proportional relationship between the amount of success a player has had and the importance they attach to luck. You will not be surprised, therefore, to know that I think luck is a big factor in no-limit hold'em tournament play. Even though luck evens out in the sense that you win roughly half your coin flips, and so on, there is no guarantee that you win your share of the few key hands that come late in big events. This is my view because the alternative, that I am not quite good enough, is too horrible for me to contemplate!"



Writing with Brandon Adams, Aaron Brown broke down the odds of great players making a major final table, where the big money is, with a phenomenal degree of precision. "Before the 2006 WSOP main event, I went to Betfair.com to get pre-tournament betting odds of various players making the final table. Phil Ivey was the favorite at 22-to-1; it should have been 877-to-1 if poker is a game of pure luck. Of course, the Betfair bettors might be mistaken, but they have proven remarkably accurate in general. Also, the player with the eighth-best odds, Allen Cunningham, paid off. If things were random, there would only be one chance in 88 that anyone from Betfair's top 10 would make the final table. Betfair quoted odds on only 114 of the 8,773 entrants, I assume the ones their customers thought were the best. The implied probabilities of making it to the final table followed a power curve closely: Probability = 0.02334 x R-0.386, where R is rank (so R = 1 for Phil Ivey, R = 2 for Daniel Negreanu, and so on; R = 8 for Allen Cunningham). This implies a Gini coefficient of 24 percent. Making the series of bets described above, $8,773-to-$1 with the worst player, $8,772-to-$2 with the second worst, and so on, produces an expected profit of $9.13 million. That leads me to say success in the WSOP main event is 24 percent skill and 76 percent luck."



Chris Ferguson, with a Ph.D. in computer science and game theory to go with his five bracelets, puts the ratio of luck to skill in poker at "pretty close to 50-50." Chau Giang, on the other hand, told Dana Smith of Card Player, "At the table I hear people say, 'Poker is luck.' That is 100 percent wrong. If they are losing, it is because they're doing something wrong. Poker is skill, it isn't luck. In the long run, day after day, you cannot get lucky all the time." If you're not exactly sure what ratio Chau is proposing, even though you think you agree with him, perhaps you'll agree with Tom McEvoy when he says, "Poker is 100 percent skill and 100 percent luck."



Andy Beal is the Dallas banker famous for not only taking on the high-stakes Bellagio pros in a series of heads-up limit hold'em showdowns for as much as $40 million, but for his tough negotiations to have the matches played on his terms. Discussing the luck-skill ratio at his Michigan summer home, Beal told me, "Playing 40 or 50 hours, 1,400 or 1,500 hands in a session is enough of a universe that luck isn't much of a factor." He has also said, "The luck factor influences more than the distribution of the cards falling. The biggest impact of luck for skilled long-term players will reside in environmental stuff: I was lucky I got an extra-good night's sleep last night; I was lucky I was 'in the zone' and playing optimally; I was lucky I didn't get mad and let it influence my play. I was unlucky that my girlfriend called in the middle of the game and told me she was leaving with my best friend, and so on. I think these are more material to longtime players. Yes, the pro doesn't let emotion into the game, but we're all human – we're lucky when the human factor doesn't become involved in our game."



Beal's opponent and friend Doyle Brunson admits that he's "got no idea" to what extent luck is a factor. "I play and do what I feel is right at that particular moment. I do know there is a lot of luck in the short term, hardly any luck in the long run." He's also famous for saying that luck favors the backbone, not the wishbone.



When played well enough to consistently overcome the luck factor, poker eventually becomes an art form. Although he's had plenty of luck in his poker life, Brunson certainly qualifies as an artist; so do Moss, Reese, Ungar, and a number of people still playing. By the time she turns 30, Annette Obrestad may be in this fast company, too. Fearlessless, brains, and panache are crucial in sizing up players as artists. Another way to say this is, they have a knack for leveraging the uncertainty inherent in the facedown and still-unseen cards into subtle but decisive advantages.



In Bigger Deal, Anthony Holden wrote: "The mystery of poker, and so its infinite fascination, lies in the element of chance, otherwise known as luck. The art of the game lies in minimizing it." But how? Putting technical skill in perspective, Howard Lederer quotes D.T. Suzuki: "If one really wishes to be master of an art, technical knowledge of it is not enough. One has to transcend technique so that the art becomes an 'artless art' growing out of the Unconscious." Lederer adds, "Staying in the moment is the path to poker success," but that we need to remain realistic. "Have I succeeded in staying in the moment at the poker table? Almost never; but I have had some success. In a recent tournament, I was sitting next to a player who, near the end of play that day, told me that he thought I had played well except for a really bad play I had made about 30 minutes earlier. I didn't remember the hand, but after he refreshed my memory, I could only agree with his assessment. I was pleased that only 30 minutes after what might have been my worst play of the day, I had already completely let go of it. I see this as a major stride in my development as a player. Beating myself up over a bad play serves almost no purpose other than distracting me from the task at hand."



In Zen and the Art of Poker, Larry W. Phillips writes, "Experienced card players believe in the bunching of luck. They have seen it. They have felt it. They know it is not a pipe dream or a mirage. Ignore this phenomenon at your peril. Even the mathematicians admit that it can happen, will happen, does happen." Chicago attorney Jim Karamanis develops this idea in an e-mail. "At least on some level, I attempt to gauge who is having a good (or lucky) night and who is not. I factor the luck of a particular player into my calculation of pot odds, and so on, in determining whether to make a call or how to play a hand. It is no different than knowing a person who is playing a rush is more likely to call a raise with an inferior hand than one who is not. It is obviously not a scientific calculation, but it is a necessary one. I am more apt to play into a player running badly or draw to unfavorable odds against that player than I am into a player having a good night. This calculation also changes during the course of an evening as a player's luck is bound to ebb and flow. Randomness encompasses disproportionate groupings of good or bad hands that manifest themselves at different times and in different sessions of poker. To ignore the disproportionate groupings in your play, to me, is foolish. That's why I am not bothered as much when a poorer player has a run of good cards. My job is not to be affected by it, but to observe what is transpiring and position myself accordingly. I may not be able to control luck, but I can certainly maximize my return by observing its effect on the game."



After losing yet another big pot to one of his Thursday night game's braying donkeys, Karamanis likes to recall a passage from R.L. Wing's commentary on the Tao: "Those who follow the Tao continually look beyond the present reality in an attempt to perceive the seeds of change. They have complete faith in physical laws that demonstrate that all of reality is in a process of change and all processes cycle in the direction of their opposite – from life to death, positive to negative, energy to matter – and back again. Because they learn to recognize and understand the law of polarity, they gain extraordinary insight into worldly affairs," poker included. In other words, maybe, just maybe, the fortunate donkeys will eventually get their comeuppance.