Can a Handicapping System be Applied to Poker?
lawh...@hiwaay.net
message board. We had been discussing the "skill versus luck" debate
in poker after reading the front page article that appeared in
yesterday's Wall Street Journal. "Steve" posed an interesting
question regarding poker handicapping which I'm not sure has ever been
addressed or considered. Here is the verbatim exchange between Steve
and myself.
Alan C. Lawhon
Huntsville, Alabama
----------------------------
Steve:
Eureka! I think you have come up with an original idea. I have never
heard of anyone in the poker world advocating the establishment of
some type of "handicapping system" to level the playing field between
amateur and professional poker players. I'm not even sure if such a
thing could be done. There are a lot of practical problems with this,
the most obvious being the random fluctuation of the cards that each
player receives and plays. I don't know how you can make the
distribution of the cards "fair". Some nights you get good cards,
other nights you don't. That's poker. Over the long run though,
every player gets about the same amount of both good (and bad) cards,
so it really boils down to a question of skill, (i.e. how well you
play the cards you get.)
This is an interesting question you have posed. I think I will post
this on RGP - the rec.gambling.poker message board - and see what the
folks there think of your idea.
Alan
-----Original Message-----
Alan,
Well, I wasn't really debating anything. I fully agree with you that
poker is a game of skill. Your example of Gary playing Tiger [Woods]
doesn't really hold water, though.
In golf there's a well-established handicapping system to allow two
unmatched players to compete on an even keel. Therefore, if their
individual handicaps were to be taken into account I'd fully expect
Gary to win way more than 1 in a hundred matches. If the handicap is
NOT taken into account, then I'd fully expect Gary to lose every
match.
Same thing in chess. There are various ways to handicap a game: the
better player removes certain pieces from his side of the board; the
better player plays the game at a faster time control; the better
player plays blind-folded, etc. I've got a fine "encyclopedia" of
chess games that features hundreds of "odds" games from the 18th and
19th century.
I played hundreds of tournament games in my chess tournament days. I
was maybe in the 80th percentile of all rated players in the U.S. I
played a number of masters (and I'm not talking an international
master or grandmaster) in tournaments (maybe three dozen times) but
only beat one of them, a fellow at the low end of the master's
ranking. That's the difference between the 80th percentile and the
95th percentile in chess.
There isn't any handicapping system in poker that I've heard of. I'd
imagine that such a system would involve, say, the better player
making X times higher bets than the poorer player. That is, the
weaker player can play for pennies while the better player must play
for quarters, or something like that. But that wouldn't really
handicap the better player, would it? I give up, how WOULD you
handicap a poker game?
Be that as it may, poker is primarily skill; you'll get no argument
from me on that score.
Steve
Maverick
based on a regressive analysis of one's play. You could also alter
the payouts by weighting them according to historical finishes. You
could even add a weighting function into the RNG when dealing cards
and give losers a slightly higher chance of being dealt better cards
or sucking out on their draws...not that any online site already does
that...
Will in New Haven
It would be even easier to establish parimutual betting on
tournaments. That way, winning would be more rewarding to longshot
players who bet on themselves and also to anyone who happened to bet
on them. This would also have the virtue of not affecting who actually
wins the tournament (which may not be a virtue to some) and wouldn't
impact the shares that the money-winners got from the prize pool.
The _major_ disadvantage would be that players would be even more
likely to find themselves/put themselves in positions where donking
off chips to another player would be +EV or EV-neutral. This already
happens but parimutual betting among the players would make it worse.
One solution would be a parimutual pool involving people who were not
in the city where the tournament was being held and had not connection
with the players in the tournament. It would still be vulnerable to
players calling people they happened to know in the area where the
betting was going on and making bets through them but this would only
become likely if the parimutual pool became quite large.
I would be happy to set up such a system for the customary 17% of the
pool that anyone setting up and running such a system so deservadly
gets.
Will in New Haven