Poker, I Could Tell You
Poker is news again with all the government raids on online poker and gaming sites. Even if online poker is poker in name only, and the players are mostly only playing the electronic random number generator on the website and the house just spits out simulations of real cards and rakes off their profit.
I was discussing poker on twitter recently with a deception expert like Cal Lightman on the TV show Lie To Me. He was saying that poker was a situational analysis game where luck could determine the outcome of a hand at any time. I was saying that poker was a game of skill and good players could be 80% skill level in the game.
Poker is an old game of phycology. A similar game called Nas was played in Persia in the 16th century and Western Europe has had variations of poker for centuries. Poker has had a place in the American Psyche, not to mention Hollywood movies, since the 1800s, and modern Stud poker with one card down and 4 cards up from a deck of 52 cards traces to 1864. Bill Gates played poker at Harvard not chess.
In the late 20th century up to today Texas Hold’em has dominated the popular game. Hold’em is much more of a game of chance and is easy for beginners to play, since everybody plays the same hand, except for two cards, and there is much less to remember and keep track of. Players can play the deal more than the other players. Television friendly Hold’em is easy for commentators to talk about and calculate odds for viewers, so that the audience can play along with the hand on the table and not have to watch multiple hands and analyze multiple players all at the same time. Hold’em is predictable, unlike real life, and more of a spectator game that everybody can watch and not have to think too hard about.
In poker games like 5-card stud and LoBall the game is much more complex and skill at remembering cards and playing the other players is much more important. It is like the difference between the pool game 8-ball, which is a beginners game that anybody can play for fun with a beer in hand, and straight pool or Snooker, where the skill of the shooter dominates and the difficulty is higher.
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