12/05/2011, Online casino

Here is an old question in the poker industry: “Is poker a game of skill or luck?”
Professor Steven Levitt, author of the “Freakonomics” bestsellers and University of Chicago professor Thomas Miles, have published a paper entitled “ The Role of Skill Versus Luck in Poker: Evidence From the World Series of Poker”.

In his paper, the author has used data from the 2010 World Series of Poker and published it on the National Bureau of Economic Research website. The 2010 WSOP – which is the largest poker event of the year, involved 57 tournaments, 32,000 players and $185 million.
The Economics professor and his colleague claim that the world's top poker players are blessed with similar levels of skill as the Major League Baseball players.

The report came just a month after the FBI blocked the three largest online poker websites in America. PokerStars, FullTilt Poker and Absolute Poker faced bank fraud, violation of the gambling laws and money laundering accusations.

Steven Levitt used statistics from the 2010 WSOP and found out that “high skilled” players won an average of $350 per tournament and took home 30% more money than they bought in for, while the “unskilled” players lost an average of $400 per event, losing approximately 15% of their investment.
Also, the authors claim that high skilled players win 54.9% of their matches – much closer to that of professional baseball than Wall Street.

“Since the year 2007, [baseball] teams that made the playoffs the previous season win 55.7 percent of their games in Major League Baseball against teams that failed to make the playoffs in the previous year. Thus, in some crude sense, the predictability of outcomes for pairs of players in a poker tournament is similar to that between teams in Major League Baseball. To the extent that baseball would unquestionably be judged a game of skill, the same conclusion might reasonably be applied to poker in light of the data."