A great many players believe that Poker is primarily a game of chance and that most consistent winners at Poker are simply lucky. Actually, Poker contains a greater skill element than any other card game, including Contract Bridge, Pinochle and Gin Rummy. Despite the fact that Poker has so many variations and that the proper winning strategy differs slightly in each one, the better player will nearly always win money and the poorer player nearly always lose money in a lone Poker session. I believe that there is more science and skill in Poker than in Bridge for the reasons that follow:

My observations of Poker games over the past 40 years have convinced me that if a Poker expert played three average players for 52 sessions, each lasting six hours, the expert player would emerge the winner 51 times. The odds against any such result at Contract Bridge under similar conditions are high.

Contract Bridge is a partnership game and as in all such games, one partner is usually more skilled than the other. Their combined ability is therefore less than that of the better player. In Poker, with each player on his own, a skilled player is not handicapped by a less able partner. That is, his skill potential is not reduced.

Contract Bridge is basically a game of strategy plus partnership signals (bidding). Poker is a game of strategy, deception, mathematics and psychology, with a considerable amount of courage thrown in. Judgment of one's opponent's psychological traits or habits plays little part in Bridge strategy, whereas a top Poker player must be a master of Poker psychology in order to simultaneously analyze the playing traits of as many as seven opponents. Deception is used much more in Poker than Bridge and knowledge of the game's mathematics is much more important in Poker than in Bridge. Also, money management is important in Poker and not in Bridge.

In most forms of Poker, the game is pure chance only until the player looks at the cards dealt him. From then on, unlike in Bridge and most other card games, chance plays a lesser role because the players need not play bad hands out to a finish. The player can throw a bad hand in and take a small loss, or perhaps none, or he can continue to play a bad hand and sometimes win by bluffing. In Stud and its variants, this decision can be made by the player each time another card is dealt until the showdown.

The skilled Poker player will play fewer bad hands than the unskilled player and thus increase his winning chances in a way that an equally skilled Bridge player cannot do.