Agree with you - sounds like we are on the same page and only confusion is on semantics. With nondeterministic games like poker, the draw guarantee only makes sense in the context of a sufficiently large number of hands. There are no guarantees on a single hand regardless of skill difference. Chess and other deterministic games essentially reach the "infinite hands" condition in a single game because there is no randomness, so the nonnegative EV is realized immediately.