Apparently to the author a skilled player is one who knows and plays all the odds correctly whereas an unskilled player plays randomly, or sub-optimally. If all players are equally knowledgeable of all the probabilities involved, then the game is a game of luck.
A true game of skill is one in which there is no luck factor. No matter the relative skills of the players, the most skilled player will win. For example, boxing is a game of skill. Poker is not. Two grand masters of poker playing against each other, the result will be determined by the cards. They might as well play Candy Land instead.
Poker is a MUCH tougher game (dozens of orders of magnitude, depending on the variant) than chess. We have no idea how close to optimal any human is at the game. Similarly, computer opponents can only play well in very limited settings like heads-up, fixed-limit Hold'em, where the game tree is a reasonable size.
Also, it depends on the period of time that you're looking at. If two people play a single hand, it's almost entirely luck. However, as the paper argues (though again in a simplistic way), as the number of iterations increases, the CLT comes into play and skill wins out.
This is true, even for "grand masters" in poker. Tom Dwan has an open challenge to play him in 50,000 hands online. If his opponent is ahead after 50,000 hands, he will pay them an additional $1M. He's not doing this because he loves to gamble. He's doing it because he knows 50K hands are a sufficient sample size to significantly reduce the luck factor.
Do you think a game like backgammon is also luck?
Prior to focusing primarily on startups and entrepreneurship, I spent a lot of time playing a lot of online poker. I've put in close to a million hands over a few years at the micro/small stakes, and I've seen bad beats, I've had bad beats, I've put on bad beats, which can all be attributed to "luck", and the swings of the day can be attributed to luck, but over the entire life time of my game, you can certainly see gradual improvement that can be attributed to skill.
When we look at televised tournament poker (not shows like Poker After Dark / High Stakes Poker, where the players need only to have the sufficient buy in and/or be invited to participate), it is not particularly surprising to see the same "grandmasters" (or pros, or whatever oyu want to call them) appear over and over again. Yes, they don't win every tournament, or every hand, or every session, but in the long term, they do win (assuming they don't start playing poorly).
Gus isn't winning every tournament. That might be due to the fact of other better players entering the game. But if your theory is correct wouldn't it mean that the more you play the better you become?
It would seem to me that a game where so much information is hidden from you and that information was randomly distributed luck is a bigger part than skill.
Chess and Go may be "pure skill" games, but there are very few popular games, sports, and practices that are similarly pure, and so the notion of how valuable or important "skill" versus "luck" is becomes murky.
The luck of the cards tends to even out over time-- this is why tournaments consist of a large number of hands.
I'm not sure of the specific numbers with Poker, but an expert Cribbage player tends to win about 55% of the time.
Poker's become much tougher the last five years or so. Quite a few of the top players formerly played Starcraft, MvC2, Warcraft, backgammon, Magic the Gathering, chess, etc. at the highest levels.
That mentality does make the games profitable though.
While it's true that all the top players understand the odds equally well there are some players that are still considered better poker players as their ability to read other players is better tuned. That's the skill element.
To quote a bit:
There is no "chance" on the chessboard, the pieces don't move by themselves. ... However, "extraordinarily improbable" things happen all the time.
After all, like so many games, the random variation can mask the effects of skill and you can only measure your skill relative to that of your opponents (so a good player against newbies might destroy them, while a superb player against good ones might only get a little ahead).
But to a set of skilled poker players the value of the cards are relatively immaterial; they will play the averages and the other players.
One of my friends (a hardened player) once put it like this:
The cards are simply there to settle those times when players call bluffs to the end
For instance, if a GM rated 2800 plays a GM rated 2700, he may lose. In fact, he may lose several games in a row. However, if the two play a 30-game match, the probability that the 2700-rated player will win is very low.
Now, if you take the best heads up no limit hold em player in the world and have him play a series of hands against the hundredth-best heads up no limit hold em player in the world, he may very well lose the first hand. He may very well be down after the first thousand hands. But if they play, say, 1,000,000 hands, the probability that the weaker player will be up on the stronger player is as low as, if not lower than, the probability that the 2700 will beat the 2800 in their match.
It's not about "skill" versus "luck"--the question is simply, "How many (hands/games/matches/etc.) must be played before the probability that the weaker player (has won/is ahead/etc.) becomes sufficiently small?
