Coincidence in eSports: How much does luck play?

If you look at different competitive sports, you can quickly see some differences. Some sports are very measurable and therefore often have the same winners, others have a certain random component. Who z. For example, if you look at a sport such as weightlifting or the shot put, you can assume that the athlete will achieve roughly the same performance in training and competition and only a few factors can influence. However, it is different with team sports like football. And eSports also have a large random component that few players would like to admit. But how lucky is there really in these sports?

What does coincidence really mean?

The concept of chance is actually a physical term that has been precisely defined. A real coincidence only occurs when there is no objective cause for an event. This is primarily used to describe the decay of radioactive particles whose decay moments appear to occur arbitrarily. However, subjective coincidence is not so strictly defined, which is why many things can be seen as coincidental. This includes events whose cause cannot be identified or whose cause is too complex to measure. A good example of this is playing roulette. In theory, one could understand why the ball moved that way, where it ricocheted, and so on. Many have therefore tried to predict game results, but mostly without success. In online roulette, on the other hand, a random generator is created through programming. That is why there is a real coincidence here too. Likewise, coincidences also occur in sports.

Chance in sport

In the meantime it has already been proven in some sports that chance plays a major role. The sports scientist Martin Lames researched this phenomenon in football and even came up with an extremely high number of coincidences. Around 47 percent of all goals here should come from chance and not be entirely attributable to the skills of the players. Of course, that doesn't mean that laypeople get half of the goals scored in professional football because it only takes chance. Instead, his study is about the fact that so many factors play a role in dynamic play between teams or several athletes that pure performance is no longer sufficient. The same can be said about eSports. In most games, each round is slightly different and it is impossible to predict the behavior of the opponents. That is of course also what makes the game so appealing. At the same time, a certain random component is preprogrammed and victory or defeat do not necessarily say anything about the pure ability of a team. Of course you can see a tendency from the victories. If someone wins non-stop or has a career like FC Bayern Munich in the Bundesliga, you have to admit that the team is probably better than the competition. A lost game in an eSports tournament does not automatically say anything about the players. For this reason, world rankings with point systems are often much more meaningful, because they show an average from many tournaments and are therefore much more objective.

Chance cannot be eradicated in competitions with several people. No matter how hard you train and how well you prepare, chance is an unpredictable factor that can thwart any team. But maybe he is exactly the reason why eSports are so incredibly exciting!