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[rod-]

This is me mentioning that some substantial fraction of poker hands are not even skill-testing at all, but just "fold now".  Presumably the marginal winner does not have an edge over a marginal loser in all of these "auto-lose" hands.  100k hands does not equate to 100k flips of a slightly-biased coin. 

[SwitchedFromStarcraft]

This is me mentioning that some substantial fraction of poker hands are not even skill-testing at all, but just "fold now".  Presumably the marginal winner does not have an edge over a marginal loser in all of these "auto-lose" hands.  100k hands does not equate to 100k flips of a slightly-biased coin.

But as Piemaster and I can both tell you, professionals make a lot of money off folks that can't (or won't) fold those "fold now" hands.  The discipline to dump trash immediately is a different sort of skill and so those hands are, in some sense of the word, skill tested.

[Piemaster]

It's not that implausile that a marginal winner at poker could go on a losing streak lasting over 100,000 hands.

Yes, it is. Do you know what the odds are of getting heads 100,000 times in a row by flipping a fair coin, even within a sample space of 1 billion flips? Astronomically small.

By a losing streak I meant losing money over that period, obviously not losing every single hand.

[DStu]

It's not that implausile that a marginal winner at poker could go on a losing streak lasting over 100,000 hands.

Yes, it is. Do you know what the odds are of getting heads 100,000 times in a row by flipping a fair coin, even within a sample space of 1 billion flips? Astronomically small.

By a losing streak I meant losing money over that period, obviously not losing every single hand.

Then, against equally skilled oponent, I would guess that the probability of that happening for a specific sample of 100.000 games is nearly 1/2, and the probability that that will happen eventually is 1.

[Piemaster]

Obviously, that's why I specified marginal winner.  And usually in poker, you don't talk about your expectation over one particular player, but more your average expectation against 'the field' in the games in which you play.