This website is all about skill games. But what exactly are skill games? How do you decide which game is a game of skill and which is not? Who decides? We’ll try to answer these questions in this article and help you learn how to win playing online cash games.
First, “skill games” is a broad category of games that can include board games, card games and other types of games that require some level of mental strategy to win. Games that immediately come to mind are card games like rummy or bridge or blackjack, board games like checkers or reversi, word games like scrabble, or number games like sudoku. The thing all these games have in common is that they require brain-power, mental skill and strategy to win.
Not all skill games rely 100% on strategy. For example, let’s compare chess to backgammon. Chess is a pure skill game. There are no dice, no cards, no element of luck. But backgammon is not a pure skill game since the outcome of the game also depends on the roll of the dice. But even though luck plays a role in the outcome of backgammon, it is still a game of skill and the player who plays the better strategy will win more often than not.
A game doesn’t have to be as complicated as chess or reversi to be considered a skill game. Tic-tac-toe is a skill game. You need to know the proper strategy to win, even though that strategy is simple enough to be mastered by a nine-year-old child.
What about video games? Almost all video games require skill to win, although the skill of video games is often the skill of hand-eye coordination rather than mental skill, or strategy and logic. Take for example driving games like Need for Speed or Project Gotham. These games require tremendous skill and ability with the game controller but less skill as far as planning out a mental strategy.
In any case, video games are generally not included in the traditional category of skill games simply because the video game category is so big and so broad that it is a separate category all by itself.
In some countries the definition of skill games has legal implications since different laws may apply to games of skill than games of chance.
To sum up, one definition of skill games — the one we use at this site — is any game that requires mental skill and strategy to gain an advantage over your opponent or, in the case of one-player games, to increase your chance of winning.