Poker Requires Skills: 3

The online casino and poker debate wages on as the University of Hamburg’s Institute of Law and Economics in Germany reveals the results of their three month study on the matter. Online casinos and online poker rooms gave up their statistics for the two researchers to study in detail. The ultimate question at hand was whether or not online poker can be considered a game of skill. Through their observations the two researchers were able to see that the skill dominant threshold which came at about 1,000 hands into the online casino game. Just so you can get into perspective how many hands that actually is, it would take a player 33 hours to go through that many hands at a land based casino and 13 hours straight at any of the thousands of online casinos.

So though the determination came to be that online poker is not like every other online casino game and indeed does require some sort of skill, chance does still play a hand in what cards you are given. It is what you do with the hand that you are dealt that skill comes into the equation. There have been other scientist that have studied this topic in great length like these two researchers. Sean McCulloch who is a computer scientist at Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware has also studied the amount of skill that it takes to successfully play a game of poker. His study was partnered with Paco Hope who works for the software consultancy firm in Washington DC, Cigital.

Together the two firms were able to look at 103 million hands from various online casinos and their games of Texas Hold’em. The games played at any given online casino were given the same conclusion, that skill is a dominant factor in playing poker effectively. The hope of the online casino industry and other internet gambling websites is that the results of these studies make enough sense to the law makers of countries and states that have banned online poker.