Dutch academics made headlines this week

The three Dutch newspapers De Volkskrant, De Telegraaf and Spits cleared the front pages this week to make space for an article about poker skills vs. luck, which resulted in renewed publicity for the subject in online poker media.

A Dutch professor in probability and statistics, Ben Van der Genugten, started the interest with statements that called the Dutch Supreme Court to reclassify poker as a skill based game, rather than a luck based game. The game was classified as luck based game back in 1998.

The professor told the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration at his university, that he had developed a formula that clearly showed that poker is a game based on skill. It should even be more skill based than other games such as fantasy sports that has been classified as more skill based than luck based. Nevertheless the court upheld the classification of poker as a game based on luck.

Professor van de Genugten developed his formula with Professor Peter Borm, a mathematics and game theory specialist, and has been used by the courts; however the classification of poker as a "game of chance" persists, causing the academic to call on the Supreme Court to change the status of the game.

Professor van de Genugten has been consulted on the application of the Dutch Betting and Gaming Act and is used in the courts as an expert witness due to his field of research. He has also taken part in a televised experiment on Dutch TV to determine the ratio of skill involved in a game of Hold’em.

The formula developed by Professors van de Genugten and Borm returns a ration that determines the relationship between how much skill and how much luck is involved in a game. The smaller the role of chance, the higher the skill value. The effect of experience in a game correlates with the players optimum play compared to a beginner in the game.

The professor compares poker to a game of roulette, that has no learning effect and that would have a value of skill of 0. A game of pure skill would have a skill value of 1. Blackjack scores a skill value of 0.049, management games such as fantasy sports score a skill value of 0.3, and poker achieves a skill value of 0.4, closer to that of chess and bridge.