To Be Lucky or to Be Skillful?

A few days back, a friend asked me a rather interesting question: If you had 100%, how would you distribute this on 2 stats, being lucky or being skillful. This brought out a small debate amongst us as he thought being skillful would give you the edge over the lucky person in most situations.

So, this prompted me to ask you readers, which would you rather be if you were playing a game of poker? Be Lucky or Be Skillful? Or maybe to some of you neutrals, be half lucky and half skillful?

The strange thing about a game of poker is no matter how good you are, or how skillful you may be, there will be days where you hit a bad run, or you just get constantly bad beat. And regardless the number of times you spin those scenarios in your head, hoping to see which plays you perhaps did wrongly, you find yourself confirming that you did everything right. You had the best hole cards. You hit the best possible flop you would ever dreamed of. You played the best way possible, every single step of the way. And yet you end up losing. How is that possible?

Interestingly enough, that very special friend of mine pointed out a game scenario to show me how a skillful person would easily beat the lucky person in a game of poker. Say for example we have Sean, a very skillful poker player, holding his AK non suited against Landon, our lucky person who was holding pocket J. Sean would start out manipulating the situation by raising preflop. Landon, being lucky and excited would just plainly call. You would not expect a re-raise from Landon here as he knows very little about the game. The flop comes out TJQ rainbow. This puts Sean in a great position here as he immediately hit his straight on the flop. Realising that he probably has the best hand here, Sean attempts to entice more money from Landon by putting in value bets. On the turn, a J is revealed letting Landon hit the quads. Now, this is where the debate is in full swing. My friend argued that Landon would fold if Sean put in a strong bet on the turn. His argument was solely based that a significant bet from Sean would indicate Sean has a strong hand and Landon, the lucky and non-skillful player of the game would fold on the reason that he thinks his pocket J is not good enough to beat Sean's hole cards. How many of you would agree this is true?

Now instead, try looking at it this way. Landon being only lucky and having no skill on how to play the game would figure he has 50% chance in any hand and he should just call all the way. He doesn't understand why one would raise so he would just merely call. The flop TJQ has no meaning what so ever to Landon. He has no thought that his opponent may hit the nuts. He has no idea what his opponent really has. To Landon, Sean's hole cards could be anything from QQ to AA or even 23.

So, how should Sean play from pre-flop, to the flop, and all the way to the river to win this hand. The answer would be regardless how Sean manipulates each betting round, he would still lose.

In a game of poker I played just recently, UTG and UTG+1 limps in pre-flop. There were 2 folds in between me and UTG+1. With pocket Aces and on the button, I raised 6xBB pre-flop. SB and BB folded. UTG folded. UTG+1 called. The flop opened out 6T2. UTG+1 checks and I raise, he shoves all in and I call. My opponent showed me a 62 off suite. The final turn and river cards were irrelevant. So, in this example, my raise of 6BB pre-flop didnt mean anything to him while holding 62 off suite. On the flop, he got lucky and hit 2 pairs while I played as if I had him. Bummer!

I only wish I was the guy with the 100% luck.