I’m a big poker fan (having my own physical poker kit and all), and I think it’s one of the most interesting casino games to exist given the interpersonal dynamics involved.
Unlike slot machines, which aim to deceive and give people a false sense of potential profitability, my understanding is the probabilities involved in poker are a hugely important part of the reason many experienced players play—they play to win. Since it’s a game that’s player vs player rather than player vs house, it is conceivable that a good player can win in the long run (house edge still exists through the form of rake and tips, but a sufficiently good player can overcome those).
This makes poker have a very different target audience than slots, especially for high stake players, where these players are hooked by the prospect of outskilling their opponents. In this mindset, luck doesn’t play a huge role in it. Of course, there may be misperceptions of how skilled oneself is or one’s opponents are, similar to how people tend to misperceive the probabilities in a slot machine.
On the flip side of experienced players, there are amateur players. These players tend to think the game is primarily luck based (getting a good hand, getting a lucky river). Due to the huge variance in the game, new players can actually win quite a lot of money from pure luck and little skill, which fuels them to perceive poker as a slot machine. This is related to the concept of swingyness in Randy’s lecture—I would consider poker a fairly swingy game, where it’s not possible for the best player to consistently win without playing across hundreds or thousands of hands. While good players hate this in the short run (why am I losing cash to this terrible player, I’m so unlucky), they love the fact that this swinginess brings more “fish” (bad players) to the game for the “sharks” (good players) to gobble up in the long run.
There might even be a third category of poker players in between the amateur and the pro: the reader. This type of player relies heavily on reads or tells, which are poker terms for signals such as body language or decision time, that potentially indicate your opponent has a strong or weak hand. In my experience and understanding of the game, reads are fairly unreliable, and few players are really good enough at reading. That means anyone who considers themself to frequently make reads are exhibiting confirmation bias when they correctly make a read, when they simply made a lucky guess.
All three of these types of players have their own reason for being addicted to the game, which forms an interesting overall ecosystem of the game.
