Best hand wins: How poker is governed by chance
Vincent Berthet · CHANCE · 2010
Second, at one of the four levels of play, all players have folded their hands except one, who is then the winner. In such cases, the player who wins the pot does not have to reveal his cards (i.e., no showdown). Because of the growth of poker’s popularity and its economic importance, the issue of whether poker is governed by skill or chance has become recurring and turned into a social debate, as evidenced by Celeste Biever’s recent paper in The New Scientist. As a card game, poker would be governed by chance if the outcome of most games were determined by the value of the cards—the distribution of the cards being random. In other words, the player who wins the pot would also be the one who holds the best hand in most cases. Poker would be governed by skill if the outcome of most games were determined by something other than the value of the cards, such as the betting technique, reading of opponents, or psychology, all of which are grouped under the generic term “skill.” The poker industry strongly promotes the idea that poker involves skill more than chance. The purpose of our study was to provide new empirical evidence to this debate. This work was done in response to a recent study by Cigital, Inc., a consulting firm, that reported two major findings over 103 millions hands: that games did not end in a showdown 75.7% of the time and only 50.3% of those in the 24.3% of showdowns were won by the best hand. Both results suggest the outcome of games is determined by something other than the value of the cards. Thus, Cigital concluded that poker is governed by skill. In our study, we show that this interpretation is not relevant when data are further analyzed. Moreover, our research applied inferential statistics, which allowed a clear test of the theoretical hypothesis that poker is governed by chance, while the Cigital research provided only descriptive statistics. Our findings provide clear statistical evidence cor roborating this hypothesis.