Learn poker skill and change your luck luckLearn poker skills from the ground up. This is the first in a series of Hold Em Poker articles that tries to answer this question. Is the game of Hold Em poker skill or luck? In my humble opinion, the answer to the question is an emphatic yes to both choices. To the novice or low limit poker player that relies on being lucky by “getting the cards” it is mostly a game of luck. When you learn poker skill and become a top-notch money winning poker player, you will know that it your skill that makes you a long term winner. The application of poker odds is a key poker skill.
Poker television exposure, mostly showing late stages of Hold Em poker tournaments, is great entertainment but that is all it is and is not a good way to learn poker. The highly edited content shows many situations where a player pushes “all in” pre flop and another player will opt to play with seemingly hopeless cards and is prepared to gamble with the luck of the draw. Most of the time the player has made the decision based on poker odds in that situation. If you are not aware why the players played this way you are almost bound to conclude that poker is all luck. Tournaments are a form of poker that, by using an escalating blind structure, insures that the game will eventually reach an end. Most of the pre flop “all in” situations seen in tournament play are forced plays dictated by the tournament format. In regular cash games and early play in good tournaments skilled play is at the forefront but unfortunately, that does not make for exciting television. If you do not play the game and especially if you are one of those anti gambling moralists, you can point to television to prove your “poker is luck” stance. If you only read the first part of this article, you will find some great ammunition supporting your uninformed “poker is nothing but luck” stance. If you play poker, regularly and poorly, you will also point to bad luck to explain your losses. Here is your opportunity to start to learn some poker skills that will stop your losses. If you are a winning poker player, you understand that there will be times when the cards will be falling or not falling for you and from this within these two extremes and your skilled play, you will generate profits in the long run. The fact that there are many players earning a regular long-term income as a poker player is a strong argument that there must be some substance to the poker is skill argument. I will start the learn poker process by joining the “Is poker skill or luck” debate with a look at the luck factor of a single hand. The results from Limit Hold Em computer poker simulations, contained in this article, were run on a poker program by Wilson Software called Texas Turbo Hold Em Version 6. The first result is from simulation one, deal number 400, hand # 1. Because I wanted one player to hold pocket AA I deliberately gave that hand to player 10. The rest of the player hole cards and the board cards were dealt randomly by the program. Note: Each player was Checked and called all the way to the river.
Board: 2c9h5c 2h 8h Winner: Seat 8 with a Flush Player comments uttered when this hand was over probably contained the following: What do I have to do to win a hand? This hand nicely fits the “poker is all luck” argument used by the “fish” that play the game, the un-informed and the anti poker puritans that claim, “Poker is purely a game of luck requiring no skill”. The river card sure proves that poker game results depend on the turn of a single card. Well, does it not. Here is one way the hand could have been played in a real life low limit game where every player had gone to the trouble to learn some poker skills. The position of each player is to the left of the seat number. The percentage figures show how often that each hand will win for this exact preflop deal. N.B. It is not possible for you know these percentages in real life due to the huge number of preflop deal combination's. They are there for demonstration purposes only.
Winning Seat was number 10 with two pair. There it is. Two different players win the same hand. A third player, seat 7, could have taken down the hand at one stage. i.e. seat 7 had two Pair on the flop and in a no limit game or tournament it is entirely possible a large bet or check raise on the flop would have won it for him. In this single hand, even when played at this low level of skill, the actions of the players that bothered to learn poker odds had changed the outcome that the “luck of the draw” had provided in the game without any skill. There is something more important to the hand, which I have not shown. The effect the play had on each player’s bankroll. I am not going to analyze the play any further than to say that the extremely bad play of seat 7 cost him dearly, in terms of his bankroll, much to the delight and benefit of seat 10. As an aside, I should mention that the famous bluff move could have been made but in this case could not have succeeded. Bluffs against more than one player rarely work at any time and many hands won with a bluff were the best hand anyway so in the real sense was not a bluff at all. The successful pure bluff is a lot rarer than most people believe it to be. These articles are a starting point to learn poker skills. Tex Canuck Go to poker blog from learn poker skill
|
