What is your favorite restaurant in town?

It partly comes down to what we buy as a decent metric (or proxy of that metric) that evaluates skill. I buy the authors' argument that if previous performances can predict future results, then poker is a game skill. The alternative, of course, is the game is rigged, but I think we can safely argue that this is not the case. In the online world, the results are replicable. Sites track the performance of players and we have a lot more data. For example, a cursory look at pocketfives.com suggests that there are people who are consistent in their performance. If we really want to retest their arguments, we can use that data and look at future tournaments. To provide a bit of anecdote, I have played poker both online and offline quite a bit and have studied "tells" in both situations. Generally, I would not suggests that tells are the primary place where the skill comes in - as players get better they are better able to disguise their tells or send false signals. So, often, the game of reading tells becomes the same as guessing what their bet really means. In the online world, you get some similar tells as well. How long a player takes to make their decision, what size their bet is, how many tables they are playing on at the same time, and whether or not they are chatting in the box can all give you some indication of their mental state and what their bets may or may not mean. Personally, I have usually done better in person than online, but that was not because of the lack of tells; it was mostly due to the player types. In person players are more likely to be casual, visiting a casino for the weekend, old school style of playing poker, or an average poker player. These styles are generally easier to play against. Online, especially starting about 2003, players became more aggressive. This was generally attributed to younger players becoming involved in the game, but also the high variance strategy of aggression on multiple hands is able to force other players to fold or give way to bad reads to the opposition. The younger, aggressive players do play in the casinos, but there seems to be a smaller percentage of them in person.