can a bad poker player....

Can a bad poker player win a tournement?

Yes. *cough*moneymakergold*cough*

Lmfao classic. They won it through their good skill.

LMAO 2. But yes they can by unbelieveable lucky I guess.

cmon u forgot darvin( didnt win ) moon and Jerry Yang...

I really don't think we can call any of those "bad" poker players, but I still think the answer is yes. Anyone can win which is what makes it worth playing for both good and bad players. The bad players hit the lottery, and the good players take the bad players monies!

yes-look at me, lol. With so many amateurs on the web today many big tourney winners are inexperienced tourney players.

It happens all the time I guess...there's enough tourneys going on it's gotta happen.

I agree,there are so many online tournaments everyday,that it has to happen.
Also just because someone gets lucky on a hand,or in a huge pot,doesnt nessiserily mean there bad players IMO.

I think at freerolls is possible even though i never saw a verry bad player winning. I saw chip leaders with 10 times the stack of the second place and after half an hour they were out of the tourney cose luck runned out.

Three words:

"Raise one million"

Absolutely bad players can win tournaments. It certainly helps to have skill, but at the end of the day all you really need to do is run good.

A deck of cards doesn't know good players from bad, and enough of this game is decided by what's 'in the cards' that a bad player can win once in a while.

Hell, I win all the time and you can't suck at poker too much more than me. (maybe if you're from Brazil)

Sure, why not?
a friend of mine won £3.5k - 1st place in MTT when he'd just started playing poker. i wasn't jealous...honest...........honest !

Was it Sklansky who developed the shove or fold strategy for new players? I'm going off memory here, so if someone has better info please correct, but he had a chart of hands that you would either go all in or fold - no raising, so it took the element of playing a hand out of it, therefore it was great for beginners. Don't know how well it would work online, but supposedly it was used successfully live. So I guess you could be bad and use this and still do well.

I have been running into this kind of play heads up alot. (maybe it's an advanced strategy for good players playing heads up, but I kind of doubt it).

Got burned on it more than once, I must say.

Just last night I went in with a pretty good lead, and he chipped away at it going all in almost every hand while I was getting trash. I would just fold and wait.

About even in chips, I get ATc and he does it again, so I figure he's just gambling and doing it with ATC and I'm probably 2:1 so I call and he has AQ. Those South Americans can drive you nuts.

Can a bottom division football team beat the current premier league champs? YES. It'd be a fluke - and they could never do it consistantly -but it could, and probably has, happened.
Could that same awful team win the league? Theoretically yes, although the low odds of them winning one individual game become exponentially magnified when challenged to win a high percentage of games against better opponents, with luck being the deciding factor on a victory.

Now apply that to poker. Anyone can win a hand against the best poker pro in the world...(er, Phil Helmuth? LMAO). Whether it means hitting the flop hard with good hole cards, or playing an awful hand and getting super lucky on the flop, or just sucking out on the river against a hand that has had you dominated. That happens. A lot.

In every tournament there is a lucky donkey who gets rewarded despite mis-playing a hand, its part of the game and people accept it. Its probably the main reason people like me keep coming back....because there is a CHANCE.

The deciding factor for me on whether a bad player can win a tourney is field size. A deeper field means a bad player is sitting there that much longer, and is forced to make more plays.

Lets say Bad Player 1 (lets call him Kev!) plays 75% of flops, so is massively loose, and raises too much/out of position/with bad draws, so is too aggressive as well. In a small field of less than 100 for example, he only needs to get a few lucky flops and double up say ten times (busting a player each time) and he's virtually at the final table. More often than not he'll have donked off the majority of his chips by the first break by missing flops and chasing second or third pairs, but on VERY rare occassions he might just LAG his way to the top spot (especially with any sort of chip lead...dangerous ground meeting a LAG chip leader!)
In a bigger field, say 1000+, he's got to KO an average of 100 players to hit the final table*. Still a slim chance, but miniscule odds of maintaining a healthy stack for hours when playing that sort of volume of hands.

Bad player 2, (Kevina maybe?). She's overly tight, only committing chips when she know's she's got the nuts, folding 50/50's and caving to any pressure. In the 100 player field, there is every chance the flops will fall her way for an hour and she is dealt good runs of hole cards.
In the 1000+ field though, you need some aggression to make the high spots and have to occassionally challenge with coin flips if you expect to win the thing, so there is a great chance she'll be blinded out by playing too Tight and Passive. Could the cards fall well for her for 5,6,7 hours? Sure. Is it a long shot? YES!

Sorry for the long reply, but while bad players can, do and will continue to win tourney's, its inconsistant.
Small games can be anyone's with a bit of luck on your side. Bad players winning the big games takes a miracle, or at least a helluva lot of luck. How many bad players have won the mega field (5000+) WSOP in the last couple of decades?
I'd say none. Seriously. Moneymaker won a couple of lucky 70-30's, but played solidly throughout, and won like 5 satty's to get there in the first place! Gold was the only real concern, and that's coz he fell in love with hands like Q 10 too often. Again though, I'd trade skills with him in a snap thanks!
So can a really BAD player, like a complete noob, win a game. YES they can, but not anything worth winning!

Yes with as many tournaments online anyone can win. Look at Moneymaker, Gold, Yang, Cada. You don't have to be a pro to win a tournament. Just have to make the right choices and catch the cards.

definately, i'm truely convinced that all you have to be is super aggressive given the right table.
i see opponents labled as calling stations all the time in chip leads.
are we talking 1st place only or in the money?
and bad players count more on luck then your good players, so you figure it out.

i've been playing a lot of low limit sngs and you wouldn't believe how bad they play. taking a lot of chances that good players normally don't hoping to get lucky. the thing is a lot of the time they do, so this would reenforce thier playing style. lol

My answer is no. You may think many things regarding their skills. Until you or anyone else equals the feat. Then suck it up and keep trying to do the same.

Even with Moneymaker, Gold, Yang, etc... They all had to play some solid poker during the tourney. I agree that they all were far worse players than the ones they were heads up against, but they avoided being eliminated by folding a lot of hands. They showed all of their lucky hands on TV, but they had to make some good decisions during the tourney. They may not be big time professionals like Doyle, Daniel, Ivey, etc... but they had to face some tough situations and make solid decisions in a field as huge as the Main Event.

lol,i win tournaments all the time and i am quite a bad player..lol

Well hard to believe bad players do win but it happens sometimes. Luck plays a factor in poker too, although this game requires more of skills and guts than any other casino games.

Watch the final table of the .10c rebuy sometime....

I have won a tournament so obviously

Ive won tournaments, so yes.

ofcoarse donkyes win tournements!
look at most the full tilt tourneys...
they just have alot of luck behind them sometimes!

me to.

I think many bad poker players can win a tournment, it happens all the time in the low limit tournments online. I have seen bad players get the chip advantage and take out player after player sine they have everyone at a table covered 5 to 20 to 1. it can be crazy, but it happens.

i keep playing those 1$ tourneys on pokerstars because i am not very good at tourneys, anyway after failing to get very far i wanted to know what kind of people got to the final table, so i started looking them up on pokerprolabs and pokertableratings, found out that most of them are consistent losers.

ofc these are the ones that win the donkaments, i have no idea what happens in sunday million or any other big tournaments.

The play at final tables is better quality than early on in each tourney, but I am sometimes amazed at the bad play one can see there. I wonder how those players made it so deep into the tourney. The short answer is "yes", a bad player can win a tourney.

Surely poker can be won with complete luck with no skill required.

Who was that guy that kept on praying to God in the final table of the WSOP? Yeah that guy...

Yes, people can go on super hot runs and take it down, but then they do not win anymore as their luck runs out.

Without a Doubt this is more then possible. There are so many examples of this. As they say all it takes to win any tournament is to run good in it. When your running good it`s almost impossible to mess it up.

That'd be Jerry "Raise One Million" Yang, the player I was alluding to above.

Though to be fair pretty much all of the final table that year played terribly.