I was debating with a friend the other day about how much room there is for "skill" in poker - Texas hold'em specifically. He was of the opinion that, though the cards were random, the multiple decision points allowing players to check, raise, or fold each round plus the social manipulation of bluffing allowed for skilled players to outperform than the strict statistical likeliness of success the cards should allow.

I, however, was of the opinion that the randomness of the cards created a situation where the decisions you make at any stage of the game are largely irrelevant. Either you crunch the probability math and make the probabilistically optimal decision, play safe, or you can push your luck on a bluff. In any of those cases, whether you are rewarded or punished is entirely out of your control - hinging entirely on what is dealt next into the river. Even the social manipulation only exists because none of the players have control over the game, and outlier hands are entirely possible each round. The room for player input to have meaningful impact on the system is so low that even in professional tournaments, a sample size of hundreds of games need to be played back to back to see any consistent performance difference between the players.

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Regardless, it got me thinking: where exactly is that invisible line where a game of chance goes from being entirely luck based, to being a game with random elements but enough input control for players to feel it become a game of skill?

I mean, obviously that's entirely subjective, and my tastes clearly sit on one side of the acceptable variability spectrum.

But still, I'm curious to try a little thought experiment:

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Assuming each die is exactly alike, I think most people would agree that there is no skill involved in this game. The results of the dice are entirely outside of a player's control. Players may create superstitious narratives around a particular die being better or worse than the rest based on its results, or that rolling the dice in a particular fashion will somehow create better sums... but these are clear fictions.

Now, there are decisions to make!

If you get three 6's, do you add them to the 6's category, or hold them and go for a full house? Which categories are you aiming to fill first? If you fill the full house and misc space early, it'll be harder to fill in the straights because if you miss you won't be able to pivot those dice into another category.

Does this make the game any more skillful? I would argue no. The core element of the game is still the same - players are just rolling a handful of dice and comparing who got the highest sum. Whether or not the dice give you what you need to fill in one category or another and when is still entirely out of your control, but now the ability to choose which ones to reroll has more emotional weight. The ability to pick the order in which you fill categories, the stress of trying to fill the ones you left to the end does a fine job of creating the narrative illusion of meaningful decision making.

With a deck of cards, the probability of what you draw is malleable. The decisions you make in one round will affect the luck of the draw for the next. If you use two 6s and three 2s to make a full house, it will be harder to score well in the "sum of all 2s" category. In short, the actions you take matter now.

Does this make the game skillful? I don't think so, but I suspect this is where people will have diverse opinions.

On one hand, game 3 objectively has room for player input to impact the game. Being cognisant of the composition of the deck and how other players are allocating their draws allows engaged players to make limited predictions as to what cards they themselves may draw, and create a plan for how they'd like to play them. On the other hand, a shuffled 52 card deck is a fairly large randomized set, and no amount of planning will help you if you aren't dealt what you need, or are dealt cards less valuable than cards dealt to other players.

For me, this is where Poker and card games like MtG sit. You can weaponize your knowledge of the deck(s), understand the implications of the game-state, make limited plans contingent on probability, and make minor tactical choices to optimize for what you've gotten so far... but ultimately how the game resolves is almost entirely dictated by who drew what and when. I argue that anything else is either the narrative that we impose on the randomness for fun and theme, or the illusion of skill given by having the agency to make decisions, even if the payoff for those decisions is completely out of our control. (Unless you play blue!)

Drafting is an interesting wrinkle - being able to pick a card of choice from a selection is great for skill expression. It gives players agency over what they receive from the deck, offers opportunities to deny other players key cards they may need to fill their own categories, and gives information on what is available not only still in the deck, but that may come around again to draft later. However, because they're picking cards one at a time from the increasingly problematic and sparse options, have extremely limited control over being able to make functional category sets.

It's almost paradoxical - in a draft players have more choices, information, impact, and decision opportunities both offensive and defensive than in any of the previous models, and yet have less control over their pick pool than they would have if they had just taken the Yahtzee model of rolling dice.

Player driven chaos! In this example, the decisions players make clearly have a direct consequence to the game-state, with the shuffled deck merely acting as a random seed before many filters of control. And yet, because of the simultaneous reveal, the card pool may still be fairly random, but more predictable turn after turn.

Which leads me to a different question: Is the (maybe unintended) chaos that comes from interacting with other players the same as the chaos generated by a randomized system as far as skill expression goes? If we have two games, one in which you simply roll dice, and another with no random elements but complex enough that the consequences of player behavior render the future game-state completely opaque... is one more luck-based than the other?

For me, I'm weirdly fine with player-driven chaos. I detest the shuffled pre-programming of the Pandemic deck and bemoan the dice reliance of some RPGs... and yet I revel at unintended three way pile ups in Diplomacy and laugh like a hyena when - in a heavy stock market game - the ripples of something someone did on turn 2 accidently tanks the economy an hour later.

Perhaps I'm a hypocrite. I'm more willing to call a player skillful for winning out whilst dealing with intrigues, economic bubbles, accidental wars, and miscalculated worker placements than one who wins because their decisions put them in a place to capitalize on a card draw, die roll, or event... Even if it took planning and prediction to set themselves up for it.

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...I really didn't intend to ramble this long.

Just kinda started a train of thought and kept going.

So! Open question:

To your own sensibilities, at what point does a game of luck become a game of skill?