Would You Rather Be Lucky or Good?
I'd rather be lucky; the problem is, there's no way to just make that decision and thus become "lucky" (unless you have a magic lamp and the genie can do his work), while there IS a way to decide to be good.
However, being "good" instead of "lucky" does NOT, as someone posted, "ALWAYS" win in the long run. No matter how long you determine the long run is, and no matter how many times you can exceed that long run, there will always be a small percentage of players who are on the wrong end of the bell-shaped curve, even if that small percentage becomes infinitesimally small. There is never a point on the bell-shaped curve where a "long run" of play will ALWAYS provide a win.
I describe video poker as a game of chance with an element of skill, because I think on any given day, how you do is linked more strongly to chance than skill (although the recreational player with no knowledge whatsoever of the game is likely to have their lack of skill predominate even over good luck - but I'm describing the other direction, where a skillful player can, I think, have a bad day based on luck no matter how perfectly they might play). I describe blackjack as a game of skill with an element of chance because, in my experience, how you do is linked more strongly to skill than chance. The only difference is my own judgment as to which element is predominant, but in both cases, as with any other game of chance, while one can assign a relative value to the chance vs the skill, one can never fully escape the element of chance, which can always overwhelm the element of skill in at least some rare instances.
Chess would likely be considered by most to be a pure game of skill.
It doesn't matter how much of an edge you have over "the house" - well, obviously it does, but not in terms of "guaranteeing" a win "always." Even if you were playing a hypothetical game where you got even money every time a card is drawn from a deck, except for the Ace of spades, when you would lose even money, while it is overwhelmingly in your favor, and any one of us would gladly take a shot at playing, there is always a very very small possibility of losing multiple times in a row and going broke.
Please be assured that I understand and fully value the element of skill, but none of us should ever forget that a run of bad luck can occur, and that we may never have a sufficient run of good luck to bring us back to even, let alone bring us to a point where our play history is up to the expected value of the game. Reports on this list of years-long runs without a royal flush are confirmation that this can happen. Even playing badly (in terms of skill), one should get a royal every so often if you play long enough, but that doesn't happen for everyone, playing badly, or playing well.
The fact that rare events can occur is what makes it impossible to be certain whether a run of bad outcomes is due to less skill than you thought you had (e.g., knowledge not as precise as you thought, or errors more common than you thought), which would be a "lesson" to learn more / play more carefully, or if it was just bad luck, or even if the machine or game is defective / rigged and the advantage you thought you had in theory is incorrect. You can certainly assign a probability to these reasons for doing poorly, but you can never say for certain that one of these reasons is the real cause of the bad run, except perhaps if you can document the lack of knowledge / skill.
--BG================
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Posted by: Barry Glazer <b.glazer@att.net>
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