In honor of the World Series of Poker, I’ll be putting up an excerpt from my book, Treat Your Poker Like A Business, for one day, and it’ll come down after 24 hours. If you’d like to buy the book, you can do so on this site or on PokerStars, where you can get it for 1900 ppl’s. Thank you for your continued support!
For someone known as a professional gambler, I have very little gamble in me. About two years into my poker career, I got a tip that the quarterback in an upcoming college football game was injured and was not going to play — something that was not common knowledge. I was in Las Vegas at the time, and laid down the one and only substantial bet I’ve ever made on a sporting event. The next three hours were some of the most grueling of my life, and I was completely disgusted with myself for putting myself through the agony over an outcome I couldn’t control.
I ultimately won the bet, but felt as though I’d lost for having laid the wager in the first place. This event also defined for me the essential difference between poker and conventional gambling.
Before you dedicate yourself to turning your poker into a significant income stream, it’s important you understand why being a poker player qualifies as a profession in the first place.
For something to be considered a profession it must contain two vital components: The game must be beatable, and it must be a game where skill is the predominant factor.
This question has become more than an academic one in recent years, as in October 2006, Congress barred the use of credit cards for online wagers. Horse racing and stock trading were exempt, but otherwise the new law hit any “game predominantly subject to chance.” Included among such games was poker.
To me, defining poker as a game of skill is actually quite simple. To do so, you just need to forget about winning at poker and think for a moment about losing. Is it possible to intentionally lose a poker game? Yes, of course. But is it possible to intentionally lose a game like roulette or craps? No, it’s not.
In games of chance, the participant cannot control the outcome. Whether your intent is to win or lose the lottery, your odds remain the same. The superstitious may disagree, but no matter how many times you pull the handle on a slot machine, your odds remain the same each time you put your coins in the slot.
But in poker, your actions can influence the outcome of a hand. You will absolutely lose if you choose to fold every single hand no matter what cards you hold. If you call bets with a hand that cannot win the pot, you will also lose every time. This is the difference between a game of chance and a game of skill.
It’s common knowledge among poker players that chance is a factor in any given hand, but over many hands poker skill will even things out, with the more expert players making a profit. At the higher stakes games I play now, I win approximately 55 percent of the time. If I play 20 tables at once, I expect to show a profit at 11 and lose at nine. This is a slim profit margin, but a profit nonetheless. If I were playing quarter games, my win-loss ratio would be about 80-20, meaning that if I played 20 tables, I could expect to win at 16 of them and lose at four.
There are some games that are skill games, but are not necessarily profitable. Take blackjack for example: It is most definitely a skill game because the outcome can easily be influenced through your actions. You can lose every single hand to the dealer if you just keep on hitting until you bust. Conversely, you can play mathematically perfect blackjack and do much better; however, the odds are stacked against any person who doesn’t count cards, and the game cannot be beaten in the long run.
In poker, we’re competing against other people in what I feel is the perfect marriage of chance and skill. A poker player is frequently all in with a card or two to come (and possibly several more cards to come if there’s an agreement to “run it twice”). There’s certainly a rush that comes when you are all in, especially given the aspect that chance will ultimately dictate in which direction the chips slide.
But if you’re a skilled poker player — or at least more skilled than the opponents you’re facing — you’ll more often than not have a mathematical edge on your opponent because you’ll have a hand or run a high percentage bluff that will that will have a better chance of winning the pot.
In poker, if you continually make good decisions and risk chips with the best hand more often than not, skill will be the primary factor in whether or not you win or lose money. Games of chance cannot make that claim.