What Are Your Chances of Winning Poker Tournaments

Have you ever thought what are your chances of winning 3 big poker tournaments during one day? Not so long ago, Pablo Gordillo, a professional player from Spain, who currently lives in the UK, made a nearly impossible hat trick. In one day he managed to overcome all the huge fields of:

• Sunday Kick Off,
• Sunday Storm,
• and The Bigger $55 tournaments at PokerStars.

He won each of them, which in total brought Pablo $101,060. The poker fans’ reaction to this feat was rather predictable. Instead of being pleased with such an outstanding achievement of their colleague, most of the community focused on the supposedly astronomically low chances of winning such poker event (unrecognized mathematicians simply multiplied the number of participants in each tournament and received a result: 1 to 348,455,720,808), which meant a non-random nature of what had happened. Unrecognized math geniuses hastened to declare that online poker was not fair. Their proof-point was simple and clear: how can something happen, the probability of which is almost 1 to 350 billion?

What Are Your Chances of Winning Poker in Reality?

Before we check whether their calculations are reasonable, which, by the way, raises great doubts, let us say that the human brain is not very capable of intuitively estimating the probability (and even less good in understanding how likely an event is). The organizers of the lotteries know about this. Therefore, to win the main prize of EuroMillions, you just need to guess 5 out of 50 numbers that fall out of one drum, and two more numbers from 1 to 11, which the second drum brings. The probability that someone will be able to do this is 1 to 116,531,800. If the lottery organizers simply offered people to guess the number from 1 to 116,531,800, the essence would not change. In terms of chances, everything would remain the same, but the people's  perception would change dramatically. If most potential lottery participants were told that they would win only if their number from 1 to 116,531,800 dropped out of the drum, they would have decided that they had little chance of success and would be right. At the same time, most of us would agree that the right choice of 5 out of 50 numbers and another two of 11, is much more likely to happen. In fact, the chances of both these events are the same.

Now let's get down to the fact that Gordillo became a winner three times. Do you remember what were his chances of winning 3 poker tournaments? The 348,455,720,808 number is the result of a simple multiplication of the participants number in three tournaments. It would be possible if a poker tournament was no different from the lottery, and each player had the same chances of winning poker tourney. Of course, it is ridiculous. Everyone knows that luck is not enough and there is a component of skill when playing poker. The best player has a much better chance of success than the worst. Looking at the statistics, it can be said that the rate of the best professional players’ winnings is ten times higher than the average figure. In other words, in a tournament with 35,000 participants, the chance for victory for each of the strongest players is about 1 to 3,500, and about 1 to 1 million - for the worst. If Gordillo belongs to the online elite (this assumption seems reasonable given that he is a professional player and has already twice attended the final table of the EPT within his short career), the chances of such a triple success are 1 to 350 million.

So what are your chances of winning poker? The thing is that they increase proportionately with your skills level. The more you play and the more you work on your results, the more chances are obtained.

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