It’s the question every live poker player has asked themselves at least once. You played perfectly. You read your opponent. You made the right decision. Yet you lost. The wrong card came out on the river. And the tournament was over.
Your fault or bad luck?
This tension — between skill and chance — is at the heart of the debate on live poker regulation in Italy. And it is the starting point of the Skill Poker Index (SPI).
The Problem: Variance Dominates Live Tournaments
Anyone who plays live Texas Hold’em poker knows what variance is. In the long run, the most skilled player tends to win. But in a tournament, the random component can cancel out any technical advantage.
This is exactly the legal issue. Italian authorities classify poker as gambling. There is no objective tool that demonstrates how skill governs the outcome of a single hand. The CONI requires this demonstration to recognize a discipline as a sport.
In online poker the problem is partially bypassed, thanks to the possibility of opening multiple tables simultaneously. The volume of hands played over the long term allows skills to emerge statistically. In a live tournament you play around 25 hands per hour. Mathematical probability alone is not enough.
What Are the Skill Poker Index
The Skill Poker Index were born from an interdisciplinary scientific study. They were presented as a degree thesis at the eCampus University in 2021, by Dr. Pietro Semeraro. They propose a new regulatory model for live Texas Hold’em poker tournaments.
The core idea is precise. If a player goes all-in before all the board cards are revealed, they surrender control of the spot to the random component. From that moment, no skill — however high — can influence the outcome. The SPI intervene at exactly that point. They introduce a partial pot distribution in favor of the best hand at the moment of all-in and consequent show down.
How It Works in Practice
The model is based on two objectively measurable factors.
1. The information available at each phase. Each card in the deck is worth 1.92% of the total possible information. As the board is revealed, information increases. With it, the ability to exercise real skills increases.
2. Stack size. With fewer than 60 big blinds it is not possible to structure a complete strategy up to the river. Chip utility measures how much stack is needed to express full technical potential.
Combining these two factors gives the Skill Index for each phase:
- Pre-flop: 60% — Opponent classification. Little information, maximum uncertainty.
- Flop: 70% — Semantic range narrowing. The story begins to take shape.
- Turn: 80% — Situation definition. Advantages and disadvantages emerge clearly.
- River — Rectification/Confirmation. Previous balances are confirmed or overturned.
In case of an early show down, the pot is partially assigned according to these indices.
Why This Changes the Debate on Poker as a Sport
The Skill Poker Index provide for the first time a deterministic and universal tool. They measure the degree of skill involved in every critical phase of a tournament. They do not change the rules of Texas Hold’em. The cards remain the same. Blind levels advance normally.
But they add a mechanism that structurally penalizes the abandonment of skills. From a sporting recognition standpoint, this is exactly what was missing. An objective criterion that demonstrates how, in the new model, the winner is the most skilled player, not the luckiest one.
This is the first step toward the recognition of live Texas Hold’em poker as a sporting discipline in Italy. And toward the birth of the sporting variant EMPOKERMENT.
This article opens the series dedicated to the Skill Poker Index. Next: why the traditional live tournament model was born with a structural anomaly that no one has ever corrected.
