The modern poker tournaments I have been reading about play what I consider to be a strange type of poker. Are there no major tournaments featuring ordinary 5-card stud & 5-card draw poker? There seems to me to be more of the luck element in the modern game. What do Posters here think? Old style poker was basically a people-reading game rather than a card game. I wonder if the modern game is more luck oriented. BTW: Did any of the Posters here see the Cincinnati Kid, a movie starring Steve McQueen & Edgar G. Robinson? When I was a teenager in the 1940's, the local bookie (Louie) ran a poker game after he closed his ice cream parlor front. Louie had no children & we had become good friends. When I bragged about being a good poker player (I won money from college classmates), Louie told me I was too young to be a good player. He was implying that it took decades of experience to be good. He challenged me to prove my skills & gave me $1000 as a stake to play in the game. He said that I could keep whatever money I had at the end of the game, but had to promise to really play rather than paying ante & folding, a strategy which would probably result in my retaining quite a bit of the $1000 Needless to say, I lost all of the $1000, most of which went to Louie, who also won from the other players. I noticed that for about 60-90 minutes, I had stayed close to even. I realized that Louie had been able to read me after that first 60-90 minutes. The next day I asked him if he would start beating me early if I played in his game again. He said no, each game is different due to different players & different mental attitudes which can change from one day to the next. He said it might take him 30 to 60 rather than 60-90 minutes the next time. When I asked some further questions, he told me that he seldom relied on obvious tells and that I did not have any. He said that after an hour or so, he began to sense how good a hand his opponents had. Apparently, the mental processing is at a subconscious level.
If it were just luck then it would seem inconceivable that the best players in the world would keep appearing as the final table. That would have to mean they are consistently lucky, and not just skillful.
The size of that font.. Really Dinosaur, can you post like a normal person without making the font so bold and large? And moving to free thoughts..
Playing complex and shifting probabilities with respect to one's resilience (the relative size of one's cache of chips, essentially) well is not luck. The most common poker tournament game ( "Texas Hold 'Em") features more shifts in the odds in the course of play. This reduces the value of "reading the table" only in games between people of greatly unequal skill at assessing probabilities. In play with people of equal skill, with betting limits enforced to reduce the otherwise overwhelming factor of greater resilience (the House always wins in Vegas), it's luck and people still. One of the reasons it takes time is that part of reading is assessing the influence of patterns that take several deals to show up. They show up sooner in simpler games, such as five card draw. Some people will bet more readily if they have - correctly - folded some number of consecutive times, regardless of their new cards, for example. There have been a couple of one shot winners in big poker tournaments - not people of no skill at all, but people whose skill, for whatever reason, never brought them close to the final tables again. Daniel Kahneman - a well known researcher in decision making under conditions of uncertainty - includes in one of his books an account of how long it would take a careful person to validate the hypothesis that they were a significantly better than average poker player - that is, justified in buying into a professional tournament. It turns out that being a few thousand dollars ahead after ten thousand hands in one of the standard casino games would probably not be enough. Of course, the hypothesis that one is a better player than one's current opponents is a different one. One of the things I like best about my country is that its characteristic games and sports - baseball and poker, in particular - involve competitive management of probabilities, playing hard and well not to win outright but to put the odds in one's favor, and then gutting it out, win or lose. That seems to be fading.
