To develop and understand the Skill Poker Index, it is essential to analyze the concept of skill in Texas Hold’em poker. The question is apparently simple. But the answer determines everything: legality, regulation and the sporting recognition of the discipline.
The main difficulty in classifying poker as a sporting activity, according to the criteria of the European Sports Charter, lies in the structural inability to demonstrate that individual skills govern the outcome of a game. It is not enough that poker requires skill. It is necessary to demonstrate that those skills are decisive. And it is exactly here that the scientific and legal debate has been stalling for decades.
- The knot of sports recognition
- The Crews: where the discipline is passed on
- Cognitive skills and problem gambling: what the 2018 study found
- Skills in Texas Hold’em poker
The knot of sports recognition
The European Sports Charter defines sport as “all forms of physical activity which, through casual or organised participation, aim at expressing or improving physical fitness and mental well-being, forming social relationships or obtaining results in competition at all levels” [CONI, 1992].
Texas Hold’em poker fully meets the first criteria. It is an activity that requires a high level of psychological and cognitive commitment. It fosters the development of social relationships through communities of practice and poker Crews widespread globally. The Crews themselves produce and sell training material in large quantities, and in doing so they spread the discipline culturally and scientifically.
But the third criterion, obtaining results in competitions at all levels, remains problematic. As long as the random component can cancel out skills at any moment of the spot, competent authorities have no objective tools to recognize the discipline as a sport. And it is on this point that the Skill Poker Index offer a concrete answer.
The Crews: where the discipline is passed on
The second criterion of the European Sports Charter, the forming of social relationships, poker meets in a way worth looking at closely.
Groups have grown up around the game all over the world: people who met by exchanging information, notions and knowledge, and who built the Crews out of that exchange. They are communities made of figures with high-level competences, and they form the cultural and scientific fabric of the discipline today.
They do not stop at socializing. The Crews produce and market educational content, and thanks to the technological tools they have learned to use they have become the channel through which the discipline is passed on: in all likelihood its main source of dissemination in the near future.
Cognitive skills and problem gambling: what the 2018 study found
Led by Dr. Mauro Schiavella and with the participation of well-known poker pro Gabriele Lepore, the 2018 study “Profiling Online Poker Players: Are Executive Functions Correlated with Poker Ability and Problem Gambling?” identified two groups of cognitive skills: one predicts playing ability, while the other predicts problem gambling. This research is part of a strand dedicated to combating gambling addiction and represents an important milestone in the international scientific community. It is the first study to demonstrate that a specific group of high-level cognitive skills is fundamental to success in Texas Hold’em poker.
It is worth looking at how it got there, because it is the method that makes the result hard to dismiss. The study focuses on executive functions, the higher-level cognitive abilities: planning, inhibiting an automatic response, holding several pieces of information together while deciding. Three poker experts assessed anonymized hand history files from the participants to establish their level of play. A trained professional then administered an extensive neuropsychological test battery, alongside questionnaires on their relationship with gambling.
The result is more interesting than the conclusion usually drawn from it. The two groups do not overlap: the executive functions that characterize the strong player are largely different from those associated with problem gambling. And among the factors that predict riskier play is a lower performance in emotional intelligence competences, particularly the intrapersonal ones: emotional self-awareness, assertiveness, self-regard, independence.
Skills in Texas Hold’em poker
The executive functions the study measured tell us that those skills exist and that they have a profile. They do not yet tell us what they are at the table: what knowledge the player brings to bear, and where it comes from.
On the strength of this evidence, skill in Texas Hold’em poker can be defined as the quality with which a player understands, reworks and applies the strategies and basic principles of the discipline, learned from the literature, at the table, or both. Among these, the calculation of probabilities traditionally occupies a central role. However, there is no empirical evidence that a deep knowledge of one’s winning probabilities is sufficient to determine the outcome of a spot or tournament. Mathematical knowledge is useful for gaining awareness of risks and for developing new strategies over the long term. But it is not enough to make sure that the winner of a spot, or of an entire tournament, is by design the more skilful player.
It is exactly this structural gap that prevents competent authorities from recognizing Texas Hold’em poker as a sporting discipline. And that makes an objective tool like the Skill Poker Index necessary.
In the next article we will explore the specific skills required in online poker and the cognitive challenges that online professionalism imposes on players.
