On September 5, the Madras High Court will resume hearings related to the Tamil Nadu government’s prohibition of online gambling. Meanwhile, IIT Delhi has released a report affirming that poker and rummy are games of skill, whether played online or offline.
The IIT study involved an analysis of thousands of online gamers who had played a minimum of 30 and a maximum of 100 games at two-player, three-player, and six-player tables. The researchers found that skill plays a pivotal role in both poker and rummy.
“Amid ongoing conversations around online gaming, the exhaustive study examines the gameplay of various players to understand if the game focuses on skill, or an element of luck prevails,” said Tapan K Gandhi, Associate Professor, Dept. of Electrical Engineering, and Cadence Chair Professor of AI and Automation, IIT Delhi.
“Throughout our research, we were presented with compelling cases that made it clear that these games indeed require an innate understanding that aids the cognitive abilities of players,” he added.
Per the report, in both poker and rummy, skill improves as users play more and more games, which implies that long-term success cannot be considered a random phenomenon.
The observation thus lends weight to the argument that the outcomes are influenced by the players’ skills and expertise.
Moreover, the standard deviation of winning percentages in the study showed a consistent pattern, highlighting that players’ performances become more stable as they accumulate more gaming experience. Standard deviation measures how dispersed the data is in relation to the mean.
This research also shows that there is no difference in online and offline versions of rummy and poker, as both require skills more than chance to succeed.