This essay is based around the concept that having a large base of well compensated professional competitors (not teachers, promoters, manufacturers or those in any sort of fringe industry) is both a sign of health of a competitive activity, as well as an important factor into attracting new competitors and fostering a sustainable environment.

In elementary school, I participated in chess tournaments. I was decent for my age division and had a lot of second through fourth place finishes. I haven’t played in years, but it was what got me started into competitive strategy games. It is a fun, challenging game, but the fact that chess is a game of perfect information stunts its development as a competitive pursuit. The absence of luck also hurts too.

Chess is very popular, but it has very little television or media presence. Professional chess players make very little from winning tournaments or betting against competitors.  Not only is it immediately evident when there is a significant skill difference between players, but with the absence of luck weaker players don’t even have an outside chance of winning a chess tournament. Only the most stubborn of personalities would willingly part from his money and dignity on a regular basis by consistently losing at chess tournaments. The absence of monetary incentives keeps down popularity levels. Sure, plenty of people enjoy the intellectual challenge of a good game of chess, but even more people like intellectual challenge and tangible rewards. There is some money in the peripheral industries, such as coaching, writing books and organizing tournaments, but the idea of learning a skill that can only be monetized by teaching the skill to someone else seems a bit like a multi level marketing scheme. It will be unappealing to most intelligent people, a category all skilled chess players belong to.

Another huge hurdle is that computers are better than the very best humans. A program that runs on a mobile phone is capable of playing at the grandmaster level. This makes cheating possible in live events and prevents online chess betting from existing. A similar situation exists in the backgammon world. Even though real money backgammon games  do exist online (likely due to a historical connection with gambling), Snowie kills the games. There is no security measure that can prevent someone from using a second computer to run a simulator.

I took up competitive Scrabble in high school. I became quite good, and had a peak rating (Scrabble uses a clone of chess rankings) in the top 25 in North America. The outlook for professional Scrabble players is even worse than chess. I wouldn’t be surprised if the guy who makes high end Scrabble clocks made more than all but one or two pros. The temptation to put pro in quotes is very strong. I doubt there is anyone who actually completely supports themselves through Scrabble winnings, but since a good number of people consider themselves professionals, I’ll take their word for it. Even if they share a home with their parents at age forty.

This gloom is despite Scrabble being an inherently better game for a sustainable tournament economy. Scrabble is a game of imperfect information and also contains a good amount of luck, as anyone who has witnessed a classic Marlon outburst can attest to. The luck in Scrabble allows players of somewhat lower skill level beat unquestionably better players and sometimes win tournaments. A good run of blanks and natural bingos is not enough to propel a truly poor player to short term success, though. The “long run” of Scrabble is fairly short and therefore players have a reasonable idea of actual skill level and are reluctant to bet money on games or enter large entry fee tournaments.

One of the major hurdles to attracting players to competitive Scrabble is that to be good, knowing thousands of obscure and utterly useless words is necessary.  That means a prospective expert Scrabble player can either play thousands of games online and learn through osmosis (like I did) or study long lists of commonly used words. The first option is more fun than the second, but it is the sort of activity that only high schoolers with few obligations can undertake. What normal, well-adjusted adult would spend hundreds or thousands of hours learning a game that provides no tangible reward?

The final nail in the coffin for the idea of Scrabble ever producing a sustainable environment for well compensated professionals is that computer programs such as Maven and Quackle can regularly defeat top human players. Plugging in the current board and your tiles can be quickly simulated to find play with the highest chances of winning. Even if these programs didn’t exist, any real money online play would be ruined by the use of dictionaries and the plethora of free anagramming tools.

That brings us to the real subject of this essay: poker. Well into my poker career, I still told people I liked Scrabble more. I’m not sure that is true anymore, but it is still close. Despite my personal affinity for Scrabble, it is undeniable that poker is a much more perfect game.

Like Scrabble, poker is a game of imperfect information as well as having luck as a significant factor. The reason the poker economy supports thousands of professional players and countless profitable amateurs is not that is popular. Even a small poker economy could support a good number of pros. Just search poker forums for graphs from players at one of the French or Italian sites. I’ve even seen results that I could live off of from the Loto-Quebec site. Poker naturally trends toward an economy where there are a few big winners and a lot of small losers and a good number of people treading water in the middle.

Poker is simple to learn but impossible to master. Poker didn’t take off on TV until the hole card camera was invented, but other than that initial hurdle, poker makes pretty good TV as far as programming based around nine, fat middle aged men sitting around a table goes. Anyone who knows the rules can weigh in on a hand, because everyone has an opinion of what someone has. People like to guess. There is no annoying software program that will show them how little they know. Ignorance is bliss.

While botting software has made a lot of progress in specific forms of poker, such as limit hold’em, sit’n'go’s and short stacked no limit hold’em, the two most popular forms of poker remain the domain of humans. Deep stack pot limit omaha and no limit hold’em are bot free at mid stakes and higher (on popular online poker sites) to the best of my knowledge. This is despite the fact that unlike in chess and Scrabble, an entity capable of creating a profitable bot at 1kNL or higher almost literally has a license to print money. You can rest assured that there are plenty of people trying. Bots will only get better and maybe one day the online poker scene will be destroyed by bots. The live poker scene will live on. Any form of poker botting that will succeed at a high level will be dependent on learning from past play of opponents. It won’t be as simple as an observer plugging in some values into a simulator and signaling his co-conspirator sitting at the table what to do.

Learning to play poker well is a lot of work, but since the rewards are aligned with the amount of effort necessary to be good, there is a whole contingent of top players who take the game to new levels. Having poker players winning seven figures a year is great for attracting fresh blood. It is important that the poker pros are making the money from winning poker games, not from marketing themselves well or being funny, controversial or attractive. This way all the shy, fat, ugly and boring people know that they can do it too. Chris Moneymaker has probably three of those characteristics and his WSOP win in 2003 was monumental. The allure of making a living from poker is even greater to the typical person when they see that an Average Joe can do it. Most of those who chase the dream fail. But some succeed, and their successes inspire the next batch of fresh blood to infuse the poker economy with cash.

The main reason poker is so great is because of how much luck plays a part. Without the variance, poker would be an obscure intellectual pursuit, like duplicate bridge. The luck factor is so great that many people actually believe that they are winning players despite losing large sums of money over a long time period. Even the worst of players will have good runs and this will reinforce their natural inclination to assume they are good. Everyone assumes they are better than average. It is only in the face of incontrovertible evidence, such as getting crushed in twenty Scrabble games in a row, do people acknowledge their true skill level. Other competitive strategy games are hurt by posting complete results online. A bruised ego is likely to leave the game entirely than continue to be humiliated. There is a reason why most live poker tournaments only post those who make the money and let the losers remain anonymous. This is also why PokerTableRatings is really bad for the sustainability of online poker.

Anyone can win a game of poker today. Even against the best of the best. But that is only borrowed money. The best of the best are destined to win no matter what happens today. That is why poker is beautiful.

If you made it down here and read the whole thing,  I hope you enjoyed it and would really appreciate some feedback. Leave a comment or, if you want it to be private, you can contact me here.