LUCK VS SKILL

i've realized i enjoy writing more than speaking, therefore i should write more. april is all about random thoughts and opinions that might only be interesting to me. i'm sorry. actually, i'm not sorry.

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there are so many similarities in poker and trading.
off the top of my head.
1) poker and trading are both  zero-sum games.
poker is a zero-sum game, meaning when someone wins $, that money is coming from another player in the game. The amount of money won and lost is balanced by the players at the table. so if i play poker and win $100, that means the 100 dollars that i won came from a losing player in the game. trading is also a zero-sum game in my opinion. (i've heard people argue that trading/the stock market is not a zero-sum game. technically it might not be, but it works for the example). say i make $1,000 trading, that means someone lost $1,000. traders, (just like poker players), are hunters. in order to eat, they have to kill. it sounds cutthroat, and it is. that's the challenge in poker/trading, you need to stay sharp and one step ahead of the competition, or you will get eaten. the game is always changing, it's very dynamic, and the edge you have today, might not be there tomorrow

2) poker and trading have a combination of luck and skill. 
chess is 100% skill, there is no luck in chess. that's why chess gets boring after a while. if you're better than someone, you're going to beat them pretty close to 100% of the time. slot machines are 100% luck, there is no skill in slot machines. 
-but poker is one of the few games where there is both luck and skill. just like trading/the stock market. A random person can buy apple stock at $100 and watch the stock go up to $250, and make some serious $$$. the same way a bad player could play poker against phil ivey and win sometimes. translation= some people just get lucky. plain and simple
-now it goes the other way too. a very good poker player can play against a table full of beginners and still lose money. why? because in a small sample size, luck can play a bigger role than skill. however, if you have EDGE, you will make money in poker/trading because over the long run, SKILL owns LUCK

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