“Take the luck out of poker, and I would win all the tournaments.”
After getting knocked out of the 2005 World Series of Poker, Phil Hellmuth made the above comment. Phil is clearly wrong. One of the reasons for the tremendous growth in tournament purses for No-limit Hold’em tournaments is that new and inexperienced players have flocked to the game after seeing other players win through a lot of good luck and a small investment.
Chris Moneymaker jumpstarted things by winning the 2004 WSOP and $2.4 million on an investment of $60. A recent example includes a Bulgarian, who defeated 991 players in one satellite and 250 in a second satellite, to reach a Poker Dome Challenge in Las Vegas. He readily admitted to only playing Hold’em for three months. His play showed he did not know all the rules of play, continually folding unraised big blinds before the flop and trying to bet or raise amounts that were less than the big blind, yet he finished in second instead of first only when his opponent hit a flush on the river to luckily win a pot with over 70 percent of the chips in it.
Small local tourneys abound all over the U.S. “All you need is a little luck and you can win in this game,” an avid player told me at a recent event. In surveying a hundred random players, 80 percent said they would not play if the luck factor were taken out of Hold’em.
Prior to the flop in Hold’em no two cards are as much as a 20-1 underdog to any other two cards. Rarely do you see someone more than a 5-1 underdog pre-flop. In a game structured like this, luck will be a factor.
If players could not win through luck, eventually only the talented players would be playing tournaments. This would mean that prize money would be the sharply reduced and according to Daniel Negreanu and others, Phil would not fare too well against only top players.
This concludes our look at “The Lucky.”
