Skill in online cash and tournament poker – evidence from India

This paper employs player level online cash and tournament poker performance data to examine empirically whether there is indeed performance persistence and hence evidence of skill in online cash and tournament poker, in the India context. The paper is novel in two respects. First is in its use of long term performance data (return on investment, RoI), of a year, to rank players and subsequent examination of whether top player perform better than the rest. Second is in its examination of effects size of the differences in RoI between top players and others. Top decile (per base year RoI) players do indeed out-perform the rest of the active field in the performance year (measured using RoI). Difference between top decile players’ RoI performance and others is‘very large’ in the case of online cash games, and this difference is ‘small’ in the case of online poker tournaments. Through this examination of effects sizes in the India online poker context of a well established poker operator, the expert view of tournaments being inherently high variance formats is supported. In both cohorts, the hypothesis that poker is a game of skill is supported through the t-tests of average RoI.