Luck doesn't exist because Law of Averages
reddit.com/r/poker/comments/5qq3ni/classic_ph...Posted Jan 29, 2017, 5:31 AM UTC
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reddit.com
That's not how math works.
I'll distinguish this when I'm not on mobile.
Here's an archived version of the linked post.
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Since when does this bot use a mobile?
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The proof of P=NP is left as an exercise to the reader.
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[removed]
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I don't really think the linked post is that bad. The responses however...
The number of poker games played by most professional poker players is so astronomically huge that the standard deviation of their luck (whatever that may be) will be absurdly small. It's true that some people will be more luck than others but over time (see CLT) people will end up being roughly equally lucky.
I'm fairly sure that by law of averages they mean the Central Limit Theorem which certainly does apply without an infinite number of samples. If they mean law of averages then this isn't really an example of law of averages. It's not reasonable to apply the same standard of statistical rigor to regular conversations. It is completely reasonable to believe that those hands happen to Hellmuth roughly as often as they do to phil. I assume they are both professional poker players with an absurd number of games under their belt. The difference between +3 standard deviations and -3 standard deviations is going to be basically nothing here.
While I agree in principle, luck is actually very important in poker. Nate Silver's book The Signal and the Noise contains a few visualizations of the differences between skilled and unskilled players, and there's a severe diminishing return on time invested. There's on graph in particular shows the 95% confidence interval for a relatively high-skilled player's profit, and the bottom of the interval takes something like a year to get over 0. I believe he notes that one particularly highly-skilled player loses consistently for something like 2 years solid.