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Message: [QUOTE="Alizona, post: 6251006, member: 444115"] Perhaps I'm not answering the exact question being asked, but let me pull out my soapbox for another rant. :D Short term results are more dependent upon luck of the cards. Long term results are more dependent upon the relative skill level between yourself and the players you face. ALL poker occurs in the SHORT TERM. Skill only reveals itself over a long period of time - over our "career" - that length of time. A lengthy length indeed. This is why we can't ever really be sure if we're winning because we're getting lucky, or if we're winning because we're more skillful than the players we face. As is often said, it takes thousands if not millions of poker hands before we can make a reasonable estimate of where we are at on the scale. Most poker players want the answer after one session, or even after a few hands. It's very silly and such players reveal they do not understand poker very well, if at all. This discussion then goes into what is called 'variance' which is short for 'variance from a normal distribution', but I've made my point and won't go into all that math and statistics gibberish. Adopt a long term viewpoint and forget about short term results! Most poker players don't seem to be able to do this, IMO. They don't have the right concept of what the "luck vs. skill" argument is all about. Poker is quite clearly a SKILL game, but NOT over the short term. So, from a lawyer standpoint, you can literally "prove" either side of the coin if you frame your arguments properly and slant them the "right" way (which is what lawyers do LOL). There's no such thing as "lucky" players over the long run, because after enough poker hands have been played, the good luck cancels out with the bad luck and all we are left with is the skill factor to determine who becomes a winning player and who doesn't. Another way to put it is... over the long run, statistical variance converges on zero - it goes completely away. But we are talking MILLIONS of hands played - over your lifetime career, basically - not just a few hundred. The long run is very long indeed, which is why so many players don't get it. Hope this helps someone understand. P.S. So I guess to answer the OP's question, ALL poker players are BOTH lucky AND skillful. We're all lucky (or unlucky) over the short term (where all poker games occur), but we're also all skillful to a greater (winning players) or lesser (losing players) degree over our careers. [/QUOTE]

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