[Tosh]

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Almost everyone believes there is more skill in tournament poker than there actually is.

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Remove the word 'tournament', and add 'in the short term' at the end of the sentence. Anyone can lose in any given short term period; cash games or tournaments. It is not till we begin to see a long term trend that we get an idea. There are daily posts on the strategy forums of this board along the lines of 'I am losing over 10k hands, I don't know what to do'. The answer is generally play more hands if you believe you should be beating the game, until your sample size is relevant.

Getting long term results in cash games, whilst playing multiple tables online, is hard enough but IMO long term tournament results don't even exist; with the size of WPT events these days you would surely need to play many 1000s before getting a sample size of any relevance at all. Noone is ever going to play enough, so how can we ever know who the best players are from results alone?

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When someone has a great year, people conclude that those results illustrate how good it is possible to be. BUT NOBODY IS ANYWHERE NEAR AS "GOOD" AS YOU WOULD CONCLUDE FROM THOSE RESULTS. And this is where people go off the beam.

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Couldn't agree more. I also think its a bad idea for any poker pro to just play tournaments as a means of support, without a very large cushion for variance.