It's often being said that there's a big element of chance in an individual poker hand, even if chance evens out over time. We all say that, but let's stop for a minute and take a closer look at the situation.

Everything is said and done

Where would chance come in to a game of poker? You may think that I'm just trying to be clever here. Chance comes in when you shuffle the deck, obviously. Right?

Maybe, maybe not. Whether shuffling can produce true chance is a question for scientists and philosophers. But it's beside the point that I'm trying to make here.

What matters for the poker player is the fact that the order of the cards is unknown. Acting correctly despite this limited knowledge is where the skill comes in.

But when play begins, there are no chance events in poker.

Bad luck is increased knowledge

When the river card comes down on the board and changes everything, it's not a random event; it's just an increase in information.

The best hand on the flop can be a loser on the river, but not because of an element of chance. The deck hasn't been shuffled since the flop, hopefully.

What has changed is that we now know more, we have more information. Of course, the cards were in the same order on the flop already, that hasn't changed.

Nothing new since the flop

The "best" hand was already doomed to be a loser on the river. It's just that, on the flop we didn't yet know the order of the cards to come.

You see where I'm heading. Even if the shuffle of the deck is in fact deterministic rather than randomized, so that we could theoretically know the order of the cards, in practice we don't know it.

The difficulty in poker is to handle this lack of information. From what we know on the flop, our hand is a winner. But when we learn more about the deck arrangement, we discover that it's not.

(Just imagine if learning was always such a thrill!)

As you see, there's actually no chance in poker. And that's why you have a chance.

In the so called chance games, you don't stand a chance against the house. They ought to be called no-chance games.