A live Texas Hold’em poker tournament, in Italy, takes place if the police chief authorises it. Not a national law, not an industry regulation: the police chief of the province. That is why in Piedmont people play and in Friuli-Venezia Giulia they do not, with the very same tournament format.
The norm the police chief applies asks him to ascertain «whether in a given game winning or losing is entirely or almost entirely a matter of chance». Ascertaining it, Crismani reports, is «an investigation of fact to be carried out case by case, taking account of the rules and of the combinations of the game itself, and bearing in mind that even a game that is not random in its ordinary form may become so should it be modified». The judgement concerns the rules that game is built with.
The report that photographed the deadlock
Professor Crismani, in his report «Sporting discipline and the game of poker», writes that the rules on live poker activity in our country are the exclusive province of the police chiefs. Each of them assesses which component he considers dominant, skill or chance, and the authorisation to operate depends on that assessment.
The weight of that assessment changes with the person expressing it, with his background and with the historical context in which he expresses it. Hence the patchwork map between the Regions that allow the game to be played regularly, restrictively though it may be, and those that deny it. It is the mechanism by which live poker in Italy is authorised Region by Region.
The tournament is a copy of cash game with rising blinds
The chance the police chief has to assess has been in the tournament since birth, because the tournament was not designed to take it out. The research calls this origin the structural misunderstanding and places it between the end of the Sixties and the beginning of the Seventies.
Those were the years of mass production, of exponential growth and of the accumulation of large profits, with quantitative analysis and the a priori rationality of Weberian memory as guiding models. Digital did not exist. Poker was a casino game, and business strategies followed the paradigms of the time, shortsighted and mono-disciplinary.
The tournament is born there, as the exact transposition of cash game with one single change: the progressive increase of the blind levels within a predefined time. That change served to give the event a certain end. In cash game there are no levels, the compulsory bets stay fixed indefinitely and the session has no end: the interval between one game and the next is a break inside a long working day.
Rising blinds solved the duration of the event. The random component stayed where it was.
What the tournament changed, and what it left behind
Being able to modulate duration and levels spread the discipline as nothing else did. It erased the cliché of the card game played through the night until past dawn, in an illegal den soaked in the smoke of a disreputable neighbourhood. It opened a market of formats of every level, from a few hours to the ten days of the World Series of Poker, and it brought many players and many entrepreneurs real results in popularity and in income.
Since then the classic mode has been called «sport poker». Inside those tournaments, however, people still play with cash game logic: what counts is the pot of that hand, not the place you reach at the end.
The creators of the time had no way of foreseeing the internet, today’s competitive level and the competences regular players would build. Sporting recognition was of no use to them.
At the all-in before the river the game stops
In the research the demonstration is a hand played in an international-level Master tournament, at a European casino, told decision by decision inside the analysis of the hand that demonstrates the structural anomaly.
The player opening from the button reads his opponent, rules out the ranges, bets half the pot to force him to put them all in, and calls the all-in holding the better hand. The dealer reveals the turn and the river, and the pot goes the other way. In the line of play there is nothing to correct. At the moment of the all-in on the flop neither of the two can bet any longer or apply a strategy: the outcome of the performance is left to fate, and the padia component takes over.
Move the same spot two cards along. With the show-down at the river the board is complete, the player who was ahead has time to notice he has been overtaken and to choose a more conservative line, and the opponent’s win arrives inside the game. The influence of the padia component is at its greatest in the all-in at any phase preceding the river, and it gives way to ludus as the river gets closer.
Luck at the table and luck in the rules
«Does it take luck in poker?» They have been asking you for years, and you answer that in the short term it counts and in the long term much less. The regular player ends up asking himself the same question, and confuses bad luck with inability: the stronger player notices and takes advantage of it.
What blocks sporting recognition is the space the rules of the tournament leave to luck when skill can no longer intervene. That is where the variance you find on your shoulders at the end of the year concentrates, and that is where nobody manages to demonstrate they played better.
The Skill Poker Index measure what the police chief has to assess
What the investigation of fact lacks is a reference: a value that says, for every phase of every spot, how much skill weighs and how much chance weighs, regardless of the real abilities of whoever is sitting at the table.
The Skill Poker Index are that reference. They are modulators of the padia and ludus components, the ones Caillois recognises inside every game and every sport we know, and they intervene solely and exclusively in the critical all-in phases before the river, where the game stops being played. They are expressed as percentage indices and in universalistic-deterministic form: the measurement the police chief does not have today.
Sporting recognition will not be able to include cash game, which has no competition, no beginning and no end, and by definition remains gambling. And the model replaces nothing: traditional Texas Hold’em remains Doyle Brunson’s «Cadillac of poker» and remains the aggregating instrument of the discipline, like the amateur associations in other sports.
The order of the steps is the one Crismani indicates. First the single disciplines are isolated and analysed one by one, then it is demonstrated that in that discipline the result depends predominantly on skill, and sporting recognition comes afterwards. In that same order a tournament meets the criteria of the European Sports Charter in form and not in substance, and skill in Texas Hold’em poker is measured before it is claimed.