appearance of "elite" players at final table

[burt m]

One often hears the statement " poker must be a game of skill as you see a lot of familiar faces at the final table so often". However, consider the following: Assume a tournament has 2000 entrants. Furthermore, assume that 100 of these are considered elite players. Now, a random selection of 8 players for the final table would result in a probability of approximately 39% that there would be at least one of these elite players chosen just by chance. Thus, appearance of elite players at a final table of a large tournament appears to confirm the laws of probability as much as the verification of the "skill" level in poker.