The Mathematical Truth about Poker Luck and Skills

• 30.06.2025 10:50 am
• headhunter
• 0 Comments

The article contains a brief dissertation about poker luck. It could seem stupid, but just hold on, there are useful nuggets herein.

The banality: there is nothing you can do about the cards you are dealt.

Certainly anyone who has at some point played poker knows this is definitely true, but just a few act like it.

Many of the players complain about how unlucky they are, whine about bad cards and agonize over hours on end about missing numerous flops and eventually losing.

If you have dreams of becoming a pro in poker you have to quit whining.

You have cards in your hands and you have to know how to play them accordingly.

You need to smile broadly when your challenger hits 2-outer the 3rd time.

Be glad when you hit your hand

Getting your share of poker luck

Since this is so obvious, you must be wondering why this article is composed anyway.

It's because I want to touch a little on poker luck.  What it means to get your fair share of cards and also what it means pros of poker say things like "it eventually evens out"

Once a reporter asked Gus Hansen if luck has a role in poker?

This was the response. In a given round, it accounted for almost ninety percent of all his outcomes. Over a month, he assumed it was 10 or even 15% and in over a year it was about 2-5%

I would say in the ballpark

Well, this is true. All pro poker players operate under assumption poker luck and somehow manage to make it. If this is not what they did they wouldn't be pros.

There are absolutely no crap shooters who are professionals regardless of what some books try to say.

This can not be as a result of the mathematical nature of the poker game.

The mathematical truth about poker luck

The mathematic al truth is actually intricate and much interesting in my own opinion.

The naked truth is that there are those folks that have been very lucky while others have been really unlucky.

Have been has been put in italics for a reason that will be clearer later.

As it is, as the hands dealt go up, the element of poker luck goes down. However, it doesn't disappear. As a matter of fact it just has to remain so as to play its role.

Look at it this way. Take that there is a long term value distribution (EV) of each poker from different positions under all circumstances possible.

It will be derive all sorts of weird hands and also outcomes that come as a result of numerous factors.

This will however equate to a normal due to the mathematical aspect, bell shaped curve.

The hands that do not get played more frequently will show up on the left hand tail.

Those hands with high EV are likely to occur rarely since the situation just got to be right for them to be paid off. These will appear on the far right curve

On the other hand, those with average outcomes will certainly occur with the greatest frequencies. These occur in the centre.

The computer hand or what is also called break even hand (Q-7o) came from cranked simulations by computer dealing of random hands.

Every player will be dealt hands from the distribution each time they are seated.

In real life, the similarity is reached only when an infinite number of hands have been dealt

Sincerely, you do not have all the time to wait for this and neither do I.