For the institutions the element that keeps poker among gambling games is one only: the impossibility, for every player involved, of using their own skills to govern the outcome of a game. Demonstrating the opposite is the indispensable prerequisite for Texas Hold’em tournaments to be recognised as a sporting activity under the criteria of the European Sports Charter.
That those skills exist, however, is no longer a matter of opinion: since 2018 there has been a scientific study that isolated and named them.
The research isolated two distinct groups of skills
The first contribution in the scientific literature comes from an Italian-Swedish team of the universities of Milano-Bicocca and Dalarna, led by Dr Mauro Schiavella and with the participation of poker pro Gabriele Lepore. The study is titled Profiling Online Poker Players: Are Executive Functions Correlated with Poker Ability and Problem Gambling? and it assesses together poker-playing ability and problem gambling in Italian professional and recreational online Texas Hold’em players.
The team identifies two distinct groups of cognitive abilities: the first predicts playing ability, the second predicts problem gambling. They are separate sets, and the research belongs to a line of work devoted to the fight against gambling addiction.
The distinction the international scientific community grants it is that of being the first study to demonstrate that a specific group of high-level cognitive abilities is a fundamental asset for succeeding at Texas Hold’em poker.
Online the player works along two cognitive paths
Online poker calls for solid abilities in handling large numbers, speed of calculation and of data processing, oriented towards expected value, EV: the average value of a decision, which can turn out positive or negative and on the basis of which you choose.
Looking deeper, those abilities sit in two different but interwoven cognitive paths. The first is the capacity, the quality and the speed with which you select in statistical terms the most pertinent data, and on those compute the equity of your perceived range against the opponent’s range — the set of combinations he may hold, inferred from his position and his playing habits — in relation to the board, and the expected value against the pot.
The second is the capacity, the quality and the speed of the critical analysis, and it is measured by the quantity and the degree of the relations you manage to build in the process of signification of the data gathered in the first path, in order to identify, elaborate and exploit the small edges. These are the two skills online poker brings into play together, and no software performs the second one in your place.
That cognitive activity has a name: empowerment
In social psychology this kind of activity has a precise definition. Bruscaglioni calls empowerment «the process of widening, through the better use of one’s own current or potentially acquirable resources, of the possibilities the subject can practise and make operative and among which he can therefore choose».
The aim of that process is to activate and facilitate change, helping whoever goes through it to come out of a deadlock. It can be spontaneous or facilitated by an operator, it can involve a whole group or a single person, and in that case it is called self-empowerment. It is the form it takes when a player works on his own resources.
Online the maths works because the volume is there
The typical workstation of the online professional is a computer, two monitors at least, keyboard, mouse and a comfortable office chair. For probabilistic calculation to be effective, that workstation has to handle from a minimum of ten to over twenty simultaneous tables, which are as many different tournaments.
Statistical value rests on the law of large numbers, and no profit comes from a single event of the daily schedule. You have to mass, that is, play the largest possible quantity of hands so that the expectations drawn from theoretical calculation are reflected in long-run reality.
Software works on the same principle. Hold’em Manager establishes for each player the typical behaviour of his sessions and translates into percentage indices every action performed in the various phases of the spot, related to the expected value against the pot generated. To be reliable, though, it needs to process at least some tens of thousands of actions by the observed player.
Live, the same maths is no longer enough
Live the scenario is very different, and the strategies suggested by the mono-disciplinary analysis of mathematics, for all their scientific purity, turn out not to be effective. Online, probabilistic calculation is the only possible tool to break down variance and generate profit; live, on its own, it is no longer enough. The reason is that live you will never be able to mass, and without volume the strategies built on quantitative, long-run analysis stop working.
The arithmetic can be done. An online professional with twenty tables open has the software process over a thousand hands an hour; a live tournament deals an average of twenty-five. Some tens of thousands of actions at that rate are not a session, they are a career. This is why identifying opponents’ ranges live is not as «simple» as online already at the pre-flop: between online and live the game does not change, what changes is how much of it can be observed, and in a live tournament session quantitative analysis is outclassed by variance.
Live, the process of signification takes the place of the process of calculation
Different tools are needed, qualitative models of analysis able to investigate the here and now instead of the long run. And live Texas Hold’em poker is the right ground: the face-to-face duels, one after another, are the natural empirical phase of the theories that study communication. De Saussure, Hjelmslev, Durkheim, Bateson, Sapir-Whorf, Habermas, Lévi-Strauss, Goffman, Bourdieu and others fill the informational void that probabilistic calculation leaves uncovered at the table.
That this was not done earlier has a historical explanation. At the origins of Texas Hold’em many of the disciplines that adopt the qualitative method did not exist, and the older ones, such as psychology, were held in scientific circles to be of little or no reliability. The tournament was born without them.
Brought to the table, those theories sharpen exploitative strategies and serve to define every situation: mathematics becomes accessory and, together with them, completes the critical analysis of the game dynamics. The change of paradigm lies there, in replacing the process of calculation with the process of signification, and it is from that change that the semiotic method for reading a hand live comes. Adopting it leads to more aggressive strategies and to an on-average higher management cost: quality is paid for.
What remains is the point we started from. The five realities of poker that professionals have taken on as a mantra, and that still today define what skill in this game is, are governed by guidelines based exclusively on the hypotheses of probabilistic, long-run mathematics. It is the definition the sector presents itself with, and it is the same one it is assessed on when it asks for sporting recognition.