tournaments won vs entered

[im a model]

is there a place where i can see how many wsop and wpt and other big events that a pro has entered (and the number of entrants in each event). my end goal is knowing how impressed i should be by chan/doyle having ten bracelets and phil having eleven considering that theyve entered like every tournament for the past 25-30 years.

this isnt that novel of an idea, so maybe you guys already have a thread on it, but doesnt it seem like if dozens of pros have been in every wsop tournament and wpt tournament for the last few decades (i know the wpt is only a few years old) that it would be statistically expected (like if it were a coin-flipping tournament) that a few of them would have about a dozen bracelets? maybe not--i dont know. thats why im hoping for some link to a study on how lucky (or skilled) you would have to be to win 11 bracelets if you entered 400 tournaments with a median of 100 entrants or whatever.

please dont hijack this into a discussion about how great phil is or how little or how much skill goes into winning wsop events.

[BigAlK]

I don't know of any site like that although I've seen the question raised before and nobody could come up with anyplace to get the events entered data. (Wins, in-the-money, and amount of winnings is, of course, trivial to find). If you're hoping to apply some math to get an exact chance based on your coin-flipping scenario that might be tough. But consider the size of the fields over the last several years in the WSOP events. If you ignored how many Hellmuth (for example) entered (assume he entered all of them even though it is physcially impossible) I'd bet the number he won (or whatever measure you used) would be far better than chance. I'd assume the number of entrants would be available some where. For sure you could get this year and I believe the year before from data on the WSOP site.

[gimmetheloot]

pokwe is luck. Do not be persuaded otherwise. You get two cards, he gets two cards, somebody wins. They were lucky to win 1 let alone 12. the odds against that are staggering they are the luckiest men alive be sure of that.

[shaundeeb]

743

[im a model]

just a quick note: the chances are obviously very small that phil won 11 bracelets by luck, assuming these were coin-flipping tournaments. but people make the mistake of applying the odds of a specific person winning as opposed to any person winning. for example, say its a coin-flipping tournament with 77 entrants and Bill Someguy wins it two years in a row. people automatically say that the odds of someone accomplishing this is 1 in 5929 (77 squared). but really the odds of someone accomplishing it is 1 in 77. the odds of Bill accomplishing it is 1 in 5929. there must be a winner the first year, so whoever wins will be 1 in 77 the next year.

so the point that phil/doyle/chan couldnt have just been lucky because the odds are so small isnt really correct. it seems correct because you are looking at it in retro-spect and saying what are the odds that phil/doyle/chan accomplish this by luck, when you should be asking what the odds are of one (or three) of the dozens of pros who have been playing these events for decades having eleven (or ten) bracelets.

i think its reasonable to say that because there is so much luck involved in poker, if we reset the world to the early 1970s and ran it all again, it would be a different few players (like bobby hoff or dewey tomko or some guy we've never heard of) who were saying, "look at the numbers--i am clearly the best. what are the odds that i have won this many bracelets by chance alone!"

[BigAlK]

[ QUOTE ]
people automatically say that the odds of someone accomplishing this is 1 in 5929 (77 squared). but really the odds of someone accomplishing it is 1 in 77. the odds of Bill accomplishing it is 1 in 5929. there must be a winner the first year, so whoever wins will be 1 in 77 the next year.

[/ QUOTE ]

I get this. It's the same as the same idea as the odds of getting dealt AA twice in a row (1 in 221) as opposed to the odds of getting dealt AA the next two hands (221 squared or 1 in 4641). I was lucky enough to have this discussion earlier this year in a casino when one of my opponents said I'd just hit a 1 in 5000 shot. I disagreed. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

This would certainly tend to lower the odds of someone winning multiple bracelets if you attribute a win to random luck since the first would essentially be meaningless from an odds persepctive. But obviously the odds will still be pretty long for anyone winning more than 3 or 4 based purely on luck. In any case I hope you'll post whatever you figure out.