Winning Races
It’s generally accepted knowledge that in order to win a large field poker tournament, you’re going to have to not only have skill, but luck on your side. If anything is a testament to this idea, it would be Jerry Yang’s 2007 Main Event World Series of Poker win, in which clearly he was one of the greenest poker players at the table, and yet still managed to take it down. With a field of several thousand, as is common at the big poker events these days, and often even online, there is inevitably going to end up a pot or two where you will find yourself all in as a coin flip, in which you must get lucky to have your hand hold up.
Tight aggressive players like Phil Hellmuth, Dan Harrington, and Allen Cunningham have said they’ve managed to avoid this phenomenon by making it through the fields without ever putting themselves fully at risk, but obviously this would be an exception rather than a rule (unless you’re as good as those guys at laying down).
With this year’s poker broadcasts, in which pro Chino Rheem made the final table with a seeming tournament-long series of outdraws and lucky hits (in addition to his great reading ability), it’s pretty clear though that you’ve got to be willing to go broke in certain spots to get the big chip stack. Though poker is clearly a game requiring an amount of skill, sometimes the best you can do is go in with the best of it and hope to survive.
