Study Pushes Poker Skill Argument

Cigital, a leading software-security consulting firm, recently released a statistical study that shows that poker is a game of skill, not chance. As a poker fan, you might be saying to yourself, “So what? Everyone knows that.” But since games of chance are considered gambling under U.S. law, the study is an attempt to show that poker doesn’t deserve to be lumped into the “chance” category.

The firm analyzed 103 million cash-game hands from PokerStars. It found that approximately 75 percent of all hands never reached a showdown. Of the 25 percent that did, the best possible hand won only 50 percent of the pots (meaning, half of the time that there was a showdown, the player who would’ve won had already folded).

“Most people think, you get your cards, and the best hand wins,” Paco Hope, Cigital technical manager and author of the study, said. “Whether or not you go to a showdown is determined by the decisions you make, which are determined entirely by your skill.”
The study correlates “player decisions” to strategy and skill. It was used in an amicus brief that was presented to the judge in a recent South Carolina court case in which poker was determined to be a game of skill, not chance — an argument that also led to recent favorable poker court rulings in Pennsylvania and Colorado.

Will this study assure that poker is classified as a game of skill? Probably not. Some pundits will make the silly argument that since PokerStars paid for the study, it somehow influenced the findings. Others who do not have a clear understanding of how a poker game works will continue to say that poker is just luck, since the decisions that a player makes are determined by the cards he draws. They have never seen an aggressive player on the button three-bet preflop with 7-2 offsuit, fire another bet on an ace-high flop, and get a player to fold a pair of kings.

As Patrick Fleming, Poker Players Alliance litigation support director, noted in a Wall Street Journal blog discussion thread, “The Cigital study is only one piece of a larger analytic framework, but it is an important piece. And when all of the pieces are put together, the evidence that poker is a game of PREDOMINANTLY skill is, as the judge in South Carolina recently stated, ‘overwhelming.’”

You can go to the Poker Players Alliance website to check the entire study.