Other Sites

Online Gambling

What Do You Need To Win? Skill Or Luck?

Luck, or skill? by Yo Spiff

This is an old question. I suppose that hundreds of years ago, the same question has been asked many times over. It came to mind once again as I was reading a feature article by Alan Krigman. He wrote:

What causes players to win at blackjack? An amalgam of luck and skill. Luck: getting a healthy helping of highly hopeful hands. Skill: knowing how to handle whatever comes along, to maximize the expected profit or minimize the expected loss inherent in the cards involved in each decision. The first, they can’t control. The second is where Basic Strategy enters the picture.

That short paragraph sums up what one needs to win a game of blackjack. It is a pretty good summary, isn’t it?

The bottom line is this: there is a certain degree wherein luck controls the game, but how you react, what you do, is up to you – and that is where skill comes in. You may be the luckiest person on the table, getting all the right cards, but if you do not know sh*t (pardon my French) about blackjack, you might very well make the wrong moves. And where will luck take you then?

I like how Krigman ended his article, with these quotes:

Which counts for more, luck or skill? Louis Pasteur reputedly said, “luck favors the well-prepared.” The punter’s poet, Sumner A Ingmark, thusly disparaged depending on the fortuity of fate:

In the fickleness of fortune, beware of placing trust,
‘Though a few may be successful, the many just go bust.