When people think of luck in poker, they tend to think of catching lucky cards, like getting dealt a bunch of good hands or getting all in with the worst hand and hitting a miracle river to survive. But on Day 1 of the WSOP main event, I think that by far the most important element of luck is your seating assignment. There are thousands of weak players in the tournament, but nearly every good poker player in the world competes as well. On later days, a disproportionate number of good players will remain. But especially on Day 1, a good table draw can all but guarantee that a good player will advance to with a healthy stack. Conversely, a bad draw can mean that that same player will need to fight tooth and nail to survive at all.
My starting table was somewhere in the middle. Mostly everyone was just very tight, and while that wasn't ideal, it also meant that I wasn't going to face a lot of tough decisions. Unfortunately, the one player I was concerned about was to my immediate left. He was a young Asian guy named Tony who plays online as Tongni. Tony is considered one of the best limit hold 'em players in the world, and he had already won a $10,000 buy-in event earlier in the series. He admitted that he rarely plays n- limit hold 'em, but he has such a good poker mind that he was still my strongest opposition.
