Raymer has really maximized his 90% luck

[kook04 0]

I was agreeing with the spirit instead of being a pedantic fuck.

You know, that phrase was lame and tired the 7th time you used it. By now, no one is impressed, and it is still lame and tired. Perhaps you should find another catch phrase to use while you patently disagree with everything anyone has ever said. Yeah, get to work on that.

[Darkritual 0]

Stop it fools. Of course he has been lucky, but everybody that has come so long in this tournamnet has been lucky several times in a long the way to the final 27. But face it, Greg Raymer has made an incredible preformance

[sanemancrazywrld 0]

An often overlooked fact about tournament poker and the amount of luck associated is that luck does not always pertain to how the cards fall for you in the hands you play. It's got a lot to do with the starting cards you are dealt and how they compare to those dealt to others at your table at the same hand.Who here doesn't feel a bit of anxiety picking up pocket J's or Q's on the bubble in tournament where you don't exactly have a lot of chips to spare? Sure they're good hands but what if it's one of those unlucky times that somone else at your table is holding pocket aces? If every time you have kings no is dealt aces but is dealt a hand like AQ and gives you action you are getting lucky. In cash games this consideration is all but irrelvent because if you are playing your hands properly luck won't matter in the long run, due to the nature of tournament poker, particually big buy-in tournaments, players are very unlikely to see a long-run and short-term outcomes are very important.So yeah, it's got a lot to do with luck. Not just in the percentages about how the cards should fall but also by what happens WHEN. I'll bet Raymer hasn't found himself in any situations where he had KK against AA. That is a measure of luck that happens to favour him so far in this tournament.

All true. Good stuff. There's a lot of "hidden" luck like this in tourneys. Luck isn't just sucking out, it's also getting things like KK vs QQ, when if you had the QQ you'd have gone broke. (Not to say that everyone always goes broke with QQ, yada yada yada). For some reason, people like to think they're doing something special when they're the ones with the KK.

 I really believe that you can't win a large poker tournament (and pretty much any WSOP event played in the past 2-3 years easily qualifies) without being very lucky and very skilled. Moneymaker seems to be a bit of an exception, if my theory is even true, but I suppose it's possible that he either a) is better than people tend to give him credit for or B) he has so much luck that he was able to overcome the presumably requisite skill.

But if B) is true, then the statement "you can't win a large poker tournament ... without being very lucky and very skilled" is false.And the statement is clearly false.

[Governator 54]

I certainly don't believe it's 90%/10%. However I do agree luck plays a very large roll in getting deep in fields this big. Bad beats happen and they can't be undone. But hey, if you are "skilled" enough to build a big stack, then get "unlucky" and hit a bad beat - You still got chips to work with.Raymer got nailed the other day (bad call maybe, I didn't bother reading) - but he's built his stack back up to top 5 in chips - That does take some skill to crawl your way back.Any player who wins this event had a lot of luck but also has a great deal of skill.

[sirliej 0]

I bet it's not.In fact, it's exceptionally unlikely that it is.

This word exceptionally, I do not believe it means what you think it means.

[mk 11]

I can't believe people want to delude themselves and think that Smash's argument here is incorrect. He laid it out very plainly, and very conservatively.He stated:if you get all the money in as a 90% favorite 20 times, you should bust. it should go without saying that this is understating.if you get all the money in as a 90% favorite 10 times, you should theoretically bust.and to the donk arguing about what sklansky would say, he discusses this in great detail in tpfap. he states that the best tournament players are CONSTANTLY passing up 3:1 or even 4:1 advantages in order to wait for opportunities when they have an even greater advantage because they understand exactly what smash is talking about above. they have to battle against the huge amount of luck involved in tournament poker as best they can.

[marchingant 0]

What's lucky is that he pushes All-in with pocket kings, and somehow gets a call from A-J off, which doubles him up.That's lucky.

[mk 11]

What's lucky is that he pushes All-in with pocket kings, and somehow gets a call from A-J off, which doubles him up.That's lucky.

What's lucky is that if he has that same scenario 3 times in a tournament (not impossible or unlikely) he should theoretically go broke, assuming all his chips are on the line.

[marchingant 0]

So winning a 70/30 race is lucky?Regardless... who is calling off half their stack before the flop with A-J?

[budfox427 0]

So winning a 70/30 race is lucky?Regardless... who is calling off half their stack before the flop with A-J?

Anytime any player wins an all-in hand against another player who was not drawing dead when all the money went in, there is luck involved, because the player has no control over what community cards will come out. In tournament poker, all the skill is gone once all the money is in the middle and your opponent has outs. That is why all the players left in the field have had some luck on their side. This does not diminish their skill at all. This is what Smash is getting at.

[kook04 0]

In tournament poker, all the skill is gone once all the money is in the middle and your opponent has outs.

Correct.The skill is in getting "all the money in the middle" with your opponent having a minimum number of outs (ideally zero). Why is this fact overlooked?

[semaj550 0]

I made a similar post in another thread but I'll reiterate it here. In a 70/30 race you are lucky whether you win or lose. That's just the nature of a probabilistic event, however, we tend to say you were simply "unlucky" when you lose and ignore the fact that you still had a chance to lose and didn't when you win.Now take the 70/30 race scenario and think how often it could come up when you're playing a tournament with over 5,600 people. Surely a dozen isn't a large number. So let's look at that. You get all your chips in as a 70/30 favorite a dozen times over the course of the tournament (for simplicity's sake let's assume that your opponent always has you covered and see your chances of getting lucky enough to win them all.P(win all 12) = 0.7^12 = 0.01384P(lose at least 1) = 1 - P(win all 12)P(lose at least 1) = 1 - 0.01384P(lose at least 1) = 0.98616So let's see here, the chances of you busting are almost 99% and the chances of you winning all 12 are just over 1%. Which event is more likely now? If you were a gambling man you'd better be getting 100:1 odds to bet on the player winning just those 12 hands.Granted it's not as cut and dry and this because you won't always be covered, etc. but it certainly illustrates the fact that to win repreated hands as a significant favorite require a lot of luck.

[jill_idle 0]

You guys are trying to quantify a subjective experience, and apply it as a general rule. Good 'luck' with that. The percentage of luck vs. skill required to win will be different for every tournament. It will depend on the number of skilled players entered vs. the number of unskilled players. Even with that, the relative skill level of each player is also an important variable, and will change from tournament to tournament. You need to have a skill coefficient on each player, and I'm not quite certain how you would determine that. Then you need to multiply the average of the coefficients at the beginning and compare it with the same calc for the players at the final table. Then you can take that number and put it on a t-shirt, and try and figure out what it means.But there is another point I actually wanted to make. There is no doubt you *need* luck to win a tournament. No player can win without it. But I recommend everyone flip this upside down. Skill is what reduces your likelyhood of losing. This game is more about not losing than it is about winning. This is an important distinction. Not losing means keeping as many of your chips as you can when your cards are inferior. A skilled player knows when to muck, and put the fight off to another time. Without skill, you lose more. It's all fine to bluff someone out of a pot, but you'll win more in that situation if you have a healthy stack you can bully with. Skill keeps a stack healthy by not losing it carelessly.

[Pokerghost2 0]

I think you can say that someone like Raymer or Ivey is at least 30-40X more likely to win a tourney then a no name player. Sure that means thats their chance is still very slim. But there odds are far improved.Best example I can use is gank's online play. The guy doesnt win every tourney he enters online but he wins far more then most players, not because hes lucky but because hes a better player.

2 bad things here. #1 lumping ivey and raymer together. #2 how many tourneys has greg raymer won to this point? i dont know the answer and u probably dont either, so 30 to 40x more likely? no.

[bobbytheo3 0]

I can't believe people want to delude themselves and think that Smash's argument here is incorrect. He laid it out very plainly' date=' and very conservatively.He stated:if you get all the money in as a 90% favorite [i']20 times[/i], you should bust. it should go without saying that this is understating.if you get all the money in as a 90% favorite 10 times, you should theoretically bust.thats not true because your likely to have a huge stack after getting your money in as a favorite all those times and winning so that when you do lose one, youll still be alive. and if you lose the first time you get all your money in as a 90% favorite?? your name is phil hellmuth.

[Mister Hand 0]

and to the donk arguing about what sklansky would say, he discusses this in great detail in tpfap. he states that the best tournament players are CONSTANTLY passing up 3:1 or even 4:1 advantages in order to wait for opportunities when they have an even greater advantage because they understand exactly what smash is talking about above. they have to battle against the huge amount of luck involved in tournament poker as best they can.

I have Sklansky's book. Would you mind giving a page citation from that book where he states that the pros are "constantly" passing up 4:1 advantages in tournaments? I mean, you're usually about a 4-1 favorite with AA preflop, but you won't see any pros folding that hand early in a tournament if someone else raises all-in. Any player who waited for greater than 80% advantages when putting up his money just wouldn't win. Those situations don't occur often enough, so he'd be folding his chips away waiting for them.

[grimtaash 0]

luck is a huge factor in tourney play. If your opponent has a single out in the deck, they can beat you. If they catch the card, it isn't skill. It's luck. If they don't catch the card, it still isn't skill. It's luck. Skilled players can fight better against luck, but with so many hands needed to win a big tourney....well, sometimes its better to be lucky than good!!!!