The Skill Poker Index are the percentage indicators that determine the partial distribution of the pot in relation to the skills involved in a given phase of the spot. They intervene solely and exclusively in the all-in phases preceding the river, and they touch nothing else in the tournament.
Of the tournament, in fact, they change nothing. The blind levels stay as they were at the origins: too invasive an intervention would denature the game, and the market of different variants is already full — Omaha Hi/Lo, Seven Card Stud, Lowball, Pot Limit. Banning the all-in would bring nothing new either: it would be one more variant, technically more complex, of the kind that never had No Limit’s success.
Where they come from
Elaborating the indices called for an interdisciplinary study carried out with an inductive method, and the role of mathematics in it was instrumental, not dominant as it traditionally is in this discipline.
The starting material is two texts anybody who plays knows: David Sklansky’s «Theory of Poker», from 1987, and Arnold Snyder’s concept of Utility, from 2008. Reread through micro-communication theories, they change sign. For the construction proper the field is semiotics and the philosophy of language, and in particular the componential semantics of the Danish linguist Hjelmslev.
The first cultural change: method in place of acceptance
The first change the model proposes is adopting the interdisciplinary method as the perspective of analysis, abandoning the concept of «acceptance» proposed in the past: the one that asks the player to accept the five realities of poker and to orient his mindset accordingly.
Take two combinations against each other, K♥K♦ versus A♠K♣. Probabilistic calculation says this is a typical 70-30 situation. And the second of the five realities, valid in a live tournament too, says that «in the short term luck is sovereign». What probabilistic calculation cannot say is when exactly that 70 or that 30 per cent will occur, inside the single spot you are playing.
The communication sciences that study languages offer the tools to fill that void, defining the situation more microscopically through the processes of signification of the data you come to know — data that in the communicative dimension are called information. Live you gather far more of it than online: besides all the mathematical data of probabilistic calculation, you simultaneously process data of a nature and quantity that online cannot even be reproduced.
The second cultural change: the pot is a consequence, not the objective
The second change concerns the way of designing and of using the tools of analysis: abandoning profit objectives, considering them a mere consequence of working well, and concentrating resources on the quality of one’s doing. Winning the pot in a tournament spot should be the consequence of the natural development of the hand, not the prime objective.
The symbolic example is blind stealing. In cash game the compulsory pre-flop bets are hard cash, the money you pay your basic expenses with. The same move in a tournament is worth practically nothing: if you get your opponents to fold you gain a blind and a half, and going from fifty blinds to fifty-one and a half acts in no way on the strategies you had built with fifty. Its only use lies in building your metagame, and it stays marginal.
That move is one of the many gross errors that surface in a live session, and they all come from the same root: the migration of cash game concepts into tournament structures. It is the child of the economic culture of the early days, oriented towards mass production and constant profit growth, which considered skills an accessory for a few professionals and aimed its marketing at attracting an ever growing number of new amateurs to impoverish in the long run. Organisations create events on profit objectives, and players process tournament spots as if they were generating an immediate profit, as in cash game.
At the all-in every skill is cancelled
There is a basic concept that many players, of every category and level, keep ignoring in its very banality: when you are in an all-in condition, every skill is cancelled. Professional or novice, in that particular situation poker puts them on the same level, because neither of them will be able to make any further bet.
One of the most important skills to master is precisely inducing your opponent to go all-in or to call one with the worse hand. But even with its perfect use, the opponent who arrives at the show-down with the worse hand can improve his point and overturn the outcome. Whoever induced that all-in used one of his skills well and, at the same time, failed to preserve his own stack and his own survival in the tournament. No player should put the tournament at risk on a spot that has not yet reached the river.
What counts is not being busted, but how
The bust-out is the most feared effect of variance, and across all categories the terror and the frustration it brings are much the same. But being busted and the way it happens are two different things, and almost nobody tells them apart. It is inside this dynamic that the keystone of the new model is hidden.
The bust-out with the hand played out is legitimate. If the spot reaches the river, the board is complete and every player has had access to all the processes of signification needed to understand the real value of his own combination. The 70 per cent favourite who at the river bets, calls or raises and at the show-down does not hold the best hand has made at least one mistake, in the use of the quantitative or qualitative processes of analysis. And the one who was behind still managed to find the information he needed to understand how willing his opponent was to put more chips in the pot.
In that condition luck stops being decisive, because with the right tools every player is potentially able to define the situation in its complexity. A skilled player can realise he has been beaten at the river and decide not to bet or to fold, knowing when, and preserving his stack. What remains is a margin of luck in your favour no greater than the one in everyday life.
The indices depend on two factors
To calculate the indices you first have to understand what they depend on. The starting point is the information acquired across the various phases of the spot: its quality, and the capacity to perceive, understand, elaborate and interpret it, translating it into the best strategies to eliminate opponents and take their stacks.
But knowledge alone is not enough, and it happens systematically: you hold the best tactical competences and you find yourself unable to practise them, because you do not have enough stack to apply them. A professional of some fame, in an advanced phase, with twenty blinds at the 10K-20K levels will not reach the river anyway: the chips run out first, and force him all-in on one of the early streets.
Hence the two distinct but deeply interdependent factors the skills depend on: the information acquired and the size of the stack. The progressive acquisition of information across the four phases of a spot allows the strategies useful to the success of the spot to be identified; the size of the stack allows the degree of applicability of those identified skills to be measured.
The weight of the stack size on your own skills is therefore a factor in its own right, and not a consequence of knowledge: however skilled you are, if the stack does not support the action you have identified, that action does not exist. It is Arnold Snyder’s chip utility.