“Poker is ALL about luck”
How many times have you heard somebody say this? I hear it SO often, even by many on this very website! Earlier today I was debating somebody during a tournament game (surprisingly he had a high rank in the top 500), and he was saying that Poker is all about dumb luck. In his own words “There is no such thing as a good or bad player, there are only good and bad cards”. It is astonishing how many people actually believe this!! 
If Poker was 100% absolute pure luck, then why are there Professional players? If it’s 100% about luck then why do some people CONSISTENTLY do better than other in the long run?? Is Phil Hellmuth, Doyle Brunson, Phil Ivey, David Negreanu, Tom Dwan and Patrik Antonius just incredibly lucky???
I was telling the guy I was debating that YES, it is true that luck in poker is a BIG FACTOR. But there are other factors as well: reading ability, strategy, knowing when to fold a very good hand or when to make a “hero call”, different methods to maximizing profits when the flop hits you and minimizing losses when you’re running cold, tactics on making your bluffs believable and knowing how often to bluff or how to entice a bluff or the skill of making others have bad reads, the ability to change your style in order to be unpredictable, the ability to recognize other people’s play-style and identify their patterns and habits but most importantly to adjust your own play-style accordingly, having good chip management and knowing chip stack dynamics (like how to bully other players with a big stack and the best way to doubling up with a small stack), ETC ETC ETC. I could literally keep listing different factors for another 20 minutes.
Right after I wrote all this in chat, somebody on our table lost with Aces to a guy with J2 and the guy says “SEE, I told you!!! It’s ALL about luck!!”… Shortly after somebody else on the table said “It is luck. If you know the secret to winning then why do you only have 1M in your bank?” (as if the amount of fake chips I have has anything to do with the point I was making… I never claimed to be good) 
CONCLUSION: Luck does play a BIG part in Poker, but luck will eventually even out. It is completely possible for one of the best pro poker players, like Phil Ivey, to lose a single game to even an 8 year old. However, if they were to play 100 games, Phil would win the majority by far. This goes back to the concept of variance. Just because you lost AA against J2 doesn’t mean the laws that govern statistics and mathematical probability gets thrown out of the window. And just because somebody keeps getting good pre-flop cards and you keep getting bad-flop cards doesn’t mean the concept of skill and talent get thrown out of the window either.
In the famous words of Pro-player “Kid Poker” David Negreanu: “Even a donkey will sometimes get lucky…” 
