The first article in the series asked the question: is Texas Hold’em poker a sport or gambling? The study’s answer is a tool, the Skill Poker Index. This article is about what that tool is made of: which authors it comes from, with what method it was built, and how it would have to be tested in the field.
- What the Skill Poker Index are
- What they rest on: the two factors
- What the model is made of
- An inductive method, built on two thousand tournaments
- The experimental design, planned and not carried out
What the Skill Poker Index are
The Skill Poker Index are a set of percentage indicators. They determine the partial distribution of the pot based on the skills involved in each specific phase of the spot.
This is not a modification of Texas Hold’em rules. The cards remain the same. Blind levels advance normally. The SPI act exclusively on the pot assignment mechanism in case of all-in and consequent show down before the river.
What they rest on: the two factors
An index comes from two quantities, and both can be measured. The first is the information available at a given phase of the hand: it grows as the board is revealed, and with it grows how much skill can be exercised. The second is the stack: below a certain threshold you cannot play a whole hand, and a player without chips has no choices to make.
The two quantities do not simply add up. They combine phase by phase, and out of that combination come the percentages the model applies: how they combine, and why the phases are not equal, is the subject of the article that opens the series.
What matters here is a different question: where they come from. Neither was invented for the occasion. Both come from literatures that already existed; the study’s work was to take them and put them back together.
What the model is made of
The Skill Poker Index were not born from an intuition: they were born from the interlocking of three contributions taken from different literatures, each solving a piece of the problem.
From David Sklansky the model inherits the informational primacy of the cards: it is the components of the deck, one by one, that govern everything that happens in the hand. It is the premise that makes it sensible to measure information rather than estimate it.
From Arnold Snyder comes the second half. In The Poker Tournament Formula II (2008) Snyder considers wrong the thesis that every chip won is worth less than those already held: it is worth more, because it unlocks skills that cannot be exercised below a certain stack. It is why the stack enters the model alongside information.
From Louis Hjelmslev comes the tool that holds the other two together. Feature Semantics begins with Leibniz, passes through Trubetzkoy and reaches Hjelmslev, who refines it with the model of Necessary and Sufficient Conditions; it breaks a code down into its minimal units of meaning, and a deck of cards is a code: fifty-two elements, each with a single, unambiguous value. It is the step that makes it possible to treat cards as quantities, and so move from cards to numbers.
None of the three, on its own, produces an index. Sklansky says what counts, Snyder how much can be made of it, Hjelmslev how it is measured.
An inductive method, built on two thousand tournaments
The model was not born at a desk. Whoever built it has worked on the problem since 2008: a partial solution came early, but the scientific element was missing, the one that could act on the game’s structure rather than the player’s attitude and remove the random component at its root.
The method is declared, and it is inductive. First a general analysis of the state of the discipline; then the extraction of the critical elements that prevent recognition as a sport; finally the construction of a structure able to cancel the random component in favor of individual skills. You start from what is observed and arrive at the rule, not the reverse.
And the base the study was built on has a precise size: thirteen years of research and more than two thousand live tournaments played in person, at different levels and different European venues. It is the model’s empirical foundation, and the reason it describes dynamics visible at the table rather than hypotheses.
The experimental design, planned and not carried out
To verify the SPI in the field, the study designed a dedicated freeroll tournament. The planned sample was one hundred players, split into two equal clusters: half accredited professionals, half amateurs. Amateur did not mean a complete novice, but someone who follows the discipline out of passion, without a continuous, structured training path. The venue was to be European, one of those regularly frequented by both categories [P. Semeraro, p. 77].
The protocol was detailed. On registration each invitee would complete an entry form with the attached questionnaire, followed by a video interview with the researcher to confirm the date and gather further information. The questionnaire served to profile each player and to read the final results in the light of that profile. Industry stakeholders were also expected, along with event organizers and the trade press [P. Semeraro, pp. 77-78].
The hypothesis to be tested was clear-cut: the winner of the event should have been the profile with the best competences [P. Semeraro, p. 78]. The empirical phase had been scheduled for February-March 2022. The Covid-19 emergency made it impossible to include its analytical report in the study [P. Semeraro, p. 77]. For the same reason a neurological study on the relations between the flow of a game and the skills involved in its phases was not integrated either. The experiment was not carried out. It is postponed with no date, but the design remains, and it is reproducible as it stands.
One clarification, because these are two distinct things: the tournament described here is the study’s validation protocol, not an event on a calendar. The live tournaments with the EMPOKERMENT variant are something else, and they are an ongoing project.
In the next article we will address the theoretical foundations of the journey: what is meant by game, what by sport, and where Texas Hold’em poker stands today in this continuum.
