For years I've heard people debate over the concept of whether poker is a game of skill or a game of chance. I don't know the current state of the debate, but was wondering if anyone has heard if this issue has been put to rest or not?
I was thinking that if only someone could devise a device of some type, a Luckometer to give it a name, to measure skill versus luck we might be able to get somewhere with the debate. I can envision such a theoretical device, the Luckometer, composed of some combination of rheostats, vacuum tubes, and other smoke filled components of the magical discipline known as electronics.
The Luckometer would have properties of being able to determine the probabilities of events happening. For instance, if 100 people played in a poker tournament the Luckometer would have the capability of determining what was the random chance of one of the people making it to a place at the final table. If a number could be determined for this event – one in a hundred making it to the final ten, then the Luckometer would provide a baseline for measuring skill.
Say for instance, the Luckometer determined that the chance of one player out of 100 making it to the final 10 was 10%, then we could postulate that this number could be used as a baseline for determining skill. The question to be determined is will this chance always be 10% for 100 players? Perhaps multiple readings of the Luckometer would validate this for us, but for now I will theorize that this is the case and will proceed with my argument based on this line of thought.
If we chose one random player and followed his tournament career for 100 tournaments, then we might think he would make it to the final table about 10 times out of 100 tournaments. For a player who makes it to the final table less than 10 times, we can brand him with the arbitrary term of “unlucky”. For a player who makes it to the final table more than 10 times out of 100, we can brand him with the arbitrary term of “lucky”.
In looking for a scientific explanation of “lucky” and “unlucky” we can determine an unknown talisman is producing this effect for the lucky, and some curse is effecting the “unlucky”. For now, we can label this unknown talisman for the lucky as “skill.”
Using the Luckometer I can theorize we can create a listing of who makes it to the final table and who doesn't. This distribution can be mapped as a bell curve with the frequent losers to the left and the frequent winners to the right. The top of the bell will be those have an average amount of wins, possessing neither talismans or curses.
I'm guessing that a science of some sort can be developed to determine probabilities. This new science of “probability” could be used to create another bell curve of expected values for people winning tournaments.
Comparing the two bell curves could yield evidence of the existence of this previously unknown talisman, “skill.”
Now to come up with a design for the Luckometer. How to design output from it? Please contatc me if you know where I can find some nixie tubes.