Cervaise opined (and if I get this wrong, C, please correct me) that it’s harder to become an expert pool player than it is an expert poker player. I believe otherwise.
Cervaise’s main evidence: he’d recently played Texas hold’em and the night’s winner was a guy whose only experience was watching Celebrity Poker Showdown.
I contend that poker does have a lot more room for beginner’s luck, as well as a greater swing from game to game – a great player can be beaten quickly in any individual game if the cards don’t go his way. Cervaise pointed out that a beginning pool player is never going to beat an expert player.
I’d argue that, over the long haul, it takes as much skill and experience to become a great poker player as it does to become a great pool player. However, not being a great player of either game, I may be completely wrong.
Anyone out there with more experience care to comment? Is one game demonstrably more difficult to master than the other?
8-ball is a game. Even if you’re playing an excellent player, there are so many luck factors involved that it’d be conceiveable that I (an excellent bar/moderate tournament player) could hold my own against a pro.
9-ball, on the other hand, is SPORT. You have so many restrictions placed on what you can do that there is very little room for improvisation, luck, or pull-it-out-of-your-ass wins. Listen to the commentators in a “race to 5” game of 9-ball. After the break, they will break out the telestrator and diagram every shot that the shooter must make, and, nine times out of ten, they are right about it. In 9-ball, it’s almost as if you’re taking someone else’s directions on what to shoot, and, in a sense, you are- you’re doing what your environment dictates you must.
Poker is difficult, what with the psychological aspect (which is present in pool, although not so much at the highest levels), but the fact remains that pool forces you to make calculations and use actual physics and your environment to be successful. You also have to be able to see all ten shots you need to make AT ONCE off the break and then make each one, setting for the next one- all the while knowing that if you miss once, your opponent will not and you will lose.
I’m an adequate 9-ball player and I do OK among my pals at poker. But if I had to bet the mortgage on either discipline, I’d like my chances at poker MUCH more than I’d like my chances at pool, even though I’m much better at the latter.
And in my experience, 9-ball is more prone to luck wins than 8-ball. It depends on what level you’re playing. I’m only a fair player. At this level, 8-ball is harder to win by accident than 9-ball. In 9-ball, you don’t need to call shots, you get ball in hand after a scratch (yes, I know it’s the same for BCA 8-ball, but not bar rules), and it’s not uncommon for a slightly stronger player to run up all the balls, miss the 9, and then have the weaker player win.
Granted, this doesn’t really happen at the expert levels. But for a casual player, I think 8-ball is much, much less prone to a lucky win than 9-ball.
I think the argument is based on false premises. Winning one game against a pro (or being the winner for one night) does not make someone an expert. Being able to do so repeatedly indicates mastery. Since there is more luck in poker, there’s a higher likelihood of that being the determining factor over a short period of time. But that doesn’t mean that the lucky player has somehow “mastered” poker. So there’s greater variance in the outcome of a poker game than a game of pool, but that doesn’t relate to the amount of skill required to master one or the other.
I agree completely.
I, a lowly two (in a ranking of 2-7), can beat my husband, who is a seven, at 9-ball about a third of the time from sheer luck or like pulykamell said, by him running out and missing the nine.