Only losers and amateurs blame the cards. After all, cards don't care; they don't take sides, and they have no memory. They are blind justice holding her scales, and in the long run they'll tip evenly for the novice and the skilled alike.

LOU KRIEGER, More Hold'em Excellence

Everyone knows that poker is a blend of skill and luck, but just how much of each ingredient is ladled into the gumbo is subject to some debate. Pros know that poker is really a long-term game. What happens today, or even this week, is too small a measure of one's skill to be meaningful. If a rank amateur were to sit down with an expert and play one hand of poker, the result would be almost all a matter of luck. If he were to play ten hands, it would still be mostly a matter of luck. If they played for hours or even played all day, short-term luck would still be strong enough to skew any results. But if the amateur and the expert were to play every day for a few months, or perhaps even a year, the distribution of cards to each player would begin to grow close to a theoretically normal distribution. In other words, once the cards come close to evening out, as they figure to in the long run, then the pro will have won much more money on his good hands and lost far less on his weak ones than his amateur opponent.

LOU KRIEGER & SHEREE BYKOFSKY, Secrets the Pros Won't Tell You About Winning Hold'em Poker