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Rethinking poker as a game of chance

27 October 2008

Leading Professor Rekindles Dutch Debate on Poker as a Game of Skill

Dutch Betting and Gaming expert Professor Van der Genugten openly disputed a 10 year old Supreme Court ruling on classifying poker as a game of chance.

“it is not a game of chance, it could be learned like chess and bridge,” Genugten said.

Using the same formula that the court used in classifying fantasy sports games, he and Prof. Peter Borm of Mathematics and Game Theory calculated that poker has a high skill value of 0.4, close to the values obtained by chess and bridge.

This formula calculates the ratio between the chance and the learning effect of the game. The higher the value obtained, the more the game is learned and therefore it is not a game of chance. Value ranges from 0 to 1/

The roulette has no skill value, Blackjack scores 0.049 and fantasy sports has a skill value of 0.3, even lower than poker.

This new findings were revealed the night before his retirement in a speech that he delivered in the University of Tilburg. Genutgen challenges the Dutch Supreme Court to revert the ruling and nullify the rule that it was punishable when one organizes poker games without a license obtained from the Holland Casino, the only operator authorized to play poker.

Upon the knowledge of this information, Liberal Party on Justice Minister Hirsch Ballin is now pressured to issue a statement regarding the possible review of this Supreme Court decision.

Coincidentally too, this idea gave the two Dutch nationals arrested for organizing a poker game without license an optimistic light. This is the first case to date that would be ruled based on the Supreme Court decision ten years ago.

Professor Van der Genugten is also an expert witness in a number of cases and joined a study in a test broadcast on Dutch TV to find out the skill ration of Texas Hold’em.

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