[ansky451]

This is a common mistake that newer players make all the time. It isn't that luck plays such a big role, its VARIANCE. The luck evens out in the end, but in tournaments, it takes way longer to even out. The nature of poker-- especially tournament poker is such that you can always win or lose in the short term, regardless of how good/bad you are-- no matter what. There are donkeys who luckbox there way to final tables all the time, but they still are losing players over the long term, they just got a great rush of cards in that specific tournament.

The amount of "luck" involved in tournament poker, and poker in general, is minimal in the long term. In cash games, if you are a winning player, you probably will rarely have a losing month (but you still will sometimes), but in tournament poker you very often will have losing months, because of the insane variance. That said, you also could have insane rushes where you are playing well, and running well (case in point: Rizen, Sirio11) and the results will just keep coming.

With regards to larger tournaments, there is an insane amount of short term luck involved. If you play a 2000 person tournament, the chances of winning without a few key suckouts are almost non-existant. Think of it this way. Say ever person in a 2000 person tournament had the same chance of winning- 1/2000. Now say theres one player who has 5x the chance of winning (this person would have to be insanely good, and this is probably not a sustainable ROI), he still only has a 1/400 chance of winning.

Obviously tournament success is not arbitrary. Why would we have a forum for it if it was. So we could discuss how to use our pattern mappers, and find the most rigged online sites (I'm looking in your direction POKERSTARS [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img])?