Re: is tournament success this arbitrary??
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am starting to really wonder how much of a role luck plays in a large tournament.
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I posted this in another forum a while ago:
Isn't this sort of question quite meaningless? Poker is in part a game of chance and in part a game of skill. Luck determines the cards that fall. In respect of who gets what cards and when they get them, the game is 100% luck. But luck will even out for everyone in the long run. No one is inherently "lucky" at poker. A winning player and a losing player will each benefit from and suffer from luck equally over a lifetime.
Skill, which in poker comes down primarily to making correct decisions with a positive expectation, is the only element of poker that creates profit over and above the long term levelling effect of luck (of course, with the rake, luck will end up considerably worse than even). Since in the long run a poker player will lose as much by being unlucky as he will win by being lucky, he is dependent entirely on skill to make a profit. In this respect, poker is 100% skill.
To use a simplified example, let's look at flipping a coin. A friend offers to flip a coin a billion times. If it comes up heads, he'll pay me $1.05. If it comes up tails, I'll pay him $1.00. The number of times it falls either heads or tails is dependent entirely on luck. No decision of mine can make heads or tails more likely. On the other hand, the profitability of my decision is in no way dependent on how the coin falls. I have used my skill (such as it is) to make an obviously correct decision and take a bet when I have the best of it. My profit depends entirely on my skill, and not on the flip of the coin. An event that is random, and therefore 100% luck, has by virtue of my decision transformed into a wager that is 100% skill.
Having said all that, I think it's much easier for limit grinders like me to view poker in this way than for people who play the occasional multi-player tournament. No one wins any particular tournament without getting "lucky". Long term profitability over a (long) career of tournaments depends entirely on skill.
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