Luck You

luck. 1 a : a force that brings good fortune or adversity b : the events or circumstances that operate for or against an individual

I thought it was pretty much a given that, over the long run, skill triumphs in poker. Isn't that why so many of us blog? Blogging is an effort to contribute to, and share in, a collective knowledge, and by doing so we hope to improve our own games to a point where we are at least better than the people we are playing against. In the past week, however, I've heard or read that some people think luck means more in poker than skill.

My initial instinct is to tell these people to stop sucking and improve their games, but then I wouldn't have the pleasure of taking their money. Plus, that presupposes that my theory (if (yourSkill > theirSkill) {LongTermWinner(you);}) is correct.

Listen, I'm not trying to claim that luck has no impact on poker. That would be Bill Walton level idiocy. (While we're at it, a note to Bill: Please never talk again.) On what I'll call F-Train's Chess-Roulette Spectrum of Luck, with chess equal to absolute zero and roulette equal to wickedly fucking retarded, poker definitely falls closer to the roulette pole than, say, baseball or the South Park variety of roshambo. It is entirely possible to get your chips in with one card to come, holding the top half of set over set, and lose. "That's some bad mazel yo", and a very different type than you'll see in a typical Yankee game, where luck runs more of the "Derek-Jeter-attempts-to-step-over-a-daisy-while-fielding-a-routine-grounder-
and-steps-on-an-irregularly-shaped-pebble-and-rolls-over-his-ankle-putting-him-
on-the-DL-for-60-days" type of unlucky.

There are two interrelated hallmarks of "luck", however, that are worth closer inspection as they relate to skill.

First, luck is a short-term phenomenon, no matter the game you're playing. In the same way that the baseball has no memory that the last time it was hit, it took an unexpected hop past the glove of stupid, juicing, grossly overpaid Jason Giambi (does that man ever stop sweating?), the cards have no memory that the last hand you played resulted in a bad beat of soul-crushing proportions. Even when that same suckout (by the way, you owe me a dollar) happens three times in a row (three dollars), or three times in one session, you may wail and gnash your teeth and claim that the universe is exacting some sort of karmic retribution on you for not helping that old woman with the gunt and the oozing lesion on her face off of the bus, but the fact of the matter is that you're experiencing a short term run of cards that defies the statistical norm. There is no random force of "luck" in the universe. There are only cold, hard numbers that dictate how infrequently a certain draw will come in, and the randomness and chaos towards which the universe is naturally predisposed that allow that draw to come in three times in succession.

How does skill affect this? One example is that it helps you to minimize your losses. When you haven't done something super stupifying like shove all-in on the flop, you can learn to discern when you're beat after the flop (based on betting patterns, verbal cues and physical tells) and release your hand. The less skilled player doesn't see this, and winds up losing his entire stack, tilting, making the walk of shame to the nearest ATM ("Have a Lucky Day!") and dumping more money into the game. Money you don't lose is as good as money you win.

The second notable characteristic of luck is that it affects all players equally. Imagine a universe of 10 Iggy-sized monkey-players, playing 10 million hands in succession from pre-flop to river, without any of them taking a break or leaving the table. After you cleaned all the shit and piss off of the monkeys and the table, you'd see that each monkey-player had hit approximately 4% of his 1-outers after the flop. Moral? Bring all of the rabbit feet, dancing hula girls, and bald-headed men to the table you want, but over a time horizon approacing infinity, the "luck" of each player is going to run the same.

Having said all of this, I should reiterate that it *is* possible to get lucky or unlucky on any discrete hand of poker. But my point is that over the long run, there is no such thing as luck, or at least the luck of all players is equal.

If the luck of all players is equal, why are some players long-term net winners while others are long-term net losers? Simple. The long-term net winners are BETTER PLAYERS than the long-term net losers. What else could it be? We've established that everyone's luck runs the same and that there is no long-term luck anyway. Any random number generator will tell you that each player receives an approximately equal distribution of hands (vis a vis other players) over the course of the long run, so it can't be differences in starting hands.

No, the long-term net winners are able to do things like (i) read their opponents for more information of a higher quality, (ii) extract maximum value from their winners (iii) minimize losses from their losers, and (iv) adjust to table conditions better than their opponents. Too many tight-weak poker bloggers (yes, yes, I point the finger at myself here, but my next post addresses this very issue) play one style of ABC poker no matter what type of game they find themselves in, and then bemoan their fate as "unlucky" when they lose. Guess what? This doesn't work! Poker is adaptive. Poker is situational. Sometimes a Sherman tank is a better choice than a diplomatic envoy. Other times a Sherman tank is an open invitation to mutually assured destruction.

Tournaments are an excellent lens through which to focus the discussion. To win a tournament, or even place highly, you have to get lucky and / or avoid being unlucky. There is no infinite horizon in a tournament, so the effect of any single lucky or unlucky play are magnified. However, over the course of thousands of tournaments (please don't limit your sample size to one or even two years of $10,000 buy-in tournaments - it's simply not big enough), you will see the lucky and unlucky plays balance out somewhat and the better players will have placed in more tournaments. Due to the top heavy payout structure that tournaments use, they may not have won as much money as other players, but they will have placed more frequently.

After all this, if you're deluding yourself into thinking that luck matters more in poker than skill does, ask yourself why you're not playing better. Or better yet, ask yourself why you're not asking yourself why you're not playing better. Yes, shining the harsh light of the truth into the dark crevices of your poker mind sucks, doesn't it? "It burnsssss us! Burnsss us, Precious!" When the Truth comes to town, however, you will find that you didn't play the hand as well as you could have more often than you think.

Let me give you an example.

It's the Dawn Summers 8-handed home game, $0.25/0.50 nolimit holdem, and I have taken the self-appointed mantle of LAG by (1) raising every time Dawn limps into a hand, and (2) generally raising or reraising 30% of my hands preflop and playing VERY fast after the flop. There are 4 limpers to my big blind when I catch AA. I raise to $4.50. Ugarte, at UTG+1, and Dawn, from the small blind are the only callers.

The flop comes 8-5-8. Dawn checks, I bet $15. Ugarte raises to $30, and Dawn folds. I push in, and Ugarte can't flip his Ah8h fast enough. No 1-outer for me and he stacks me.

At first, I sighed and gave Ugarte a look of disgust. "A8 suited?" I asked accusingly. Then I stopped and gave it some more reflection and two points struck me. First, I was playing the LAG role. Calling, with position, against a LAG holding a medium suited ace may not be all that terrible a play.

Second, what you don't know about Ugarte, but I do after having played against Ugarte over hundreds of hours of poker, is that Ugarte will be the first to tell you that he has a tendency to play tight weak poker. For him to raise over half his stack on the flop, he is sitting on a monster EVEN THOUGH I HAVE BEEN PLAYING THE LAG ROLE FOR OVER AN HOUR. (Of course, now that I've said that, Ugarte knows that I think he plays that way and will adjust his play. The cycle continues.)

Upon reflection, the evidence was ample that I was beat. Now, I could wail about how unlucky it is for AA to get outflopped by A8, and it's true that the odds gave AA a huge advantage, but the fact is I had a chance to minimize my losses after the "unlucky" flop came and I bull-headedly avoided it. Money you don't lose is as good as money you win, and I blew it.

Whenever I *play* a hand (note: outcome irrelevant!), I always ask myself afterwards if I could have played it better, even if the other player sucked out on me. If you're trying to improve your game and you're not doing that, you've got bigger problems in poker than the luck component.

[Edited to add: ScurvyDog has written an excellent coda to this post, managing to distill a few points more eloquently than I was able.]