Is poker a skill game? New insights from statistical physics

Abstract

During last years poker has gained a lot of prestige in several countries and, beyond to be one of the most famous card games, it represents a modern challenge for scientists belonging to different communities, spanning from artificial intelligence to physics and from psychology to mathematics.Unlike games like chess, the task of classifying the nature of poker (i.e., as 'skill game' or gambling) seems really hard and it also constitutes a current problem, whose solution has several implications.In general, gambling offers equal winning probabilities both to rational players (i.e., those that use a strategy) and to irrational ones (i.e., those without a strategy). Therefore, in order to uncover the nature of poker, a viable way is comparing performances of rational versus irrational players during a series of challenges. Recently, a work on this topic revealed that rationality is a fundamental ingredient to succeed in poker tournaments. In this study we analyze a simple model of poker challenges by a statistical physics approach, with the aim to uncover the nature of this game. As main result we found that, under particular conditions, few irrational players can turn poker into gambling. Therefore, although rationality is a key ingredient to succeed in poker, also the format of challenges has an important role in these dynamics, as it can strongly influence the underlying nature of the game. The importance of our results lies on related implications, as for instance in identifying the limits poker can be considered as a 'skill game' and, as a consequence, which kind of format must be chosen to devise algorithms able to face humans. *

Factors in Learning Dynamics Influencing Relative Strengths of Strategies in Poker Simulation

“…Javarone established poker as a game of skill using tournaments between rational and random agents [20] before introducing population dynamics to enable agents to revise their strategy through play. By employing voter-model-like dynamics, it was shown that under various initial population compositions, the rational strategy is ultimately the one that is learned [27]. Acknowledging that a revision rule predicated on knowledge of the opponent's strategy is unrealistic, most recently Javarone introduced a strategy revision rule that only depends on the payoff received.…”

Strategy equilibrium in dilemma games with off-diagonal payoff perturbations

“…Financial trading [43], emergency medicine [44], and even poker games [45] are just a few examples we can mention to appreciate the relevance of a heterogeneity in risk and reward perception in a system. For instance, rational but risky decisions can be essential to achieve favorable outcomes, and individuals actually show a variety of behaviors in the above listed activities.…”

A Simulation Study of Texas Hold ’em Poker: What Taylor Swift Understands and James Bond Doesn’t

“…Through exhaustive iteration, the game has been weakly solved and optimal strategies obtained for decision making under certain conditions, including for games with only two players [2,13]. Similarly, there has been significant progress looking at the effects of irrational and suboptimal behaviour in poker playing [6,7]. Perhaps the most interesting of these look at neuroevolution models, which are trained on opponents' behaviour on prior hands to predict when certain players might be playing suboptimally [4,8].…”