Luck, Skill, and Improving at Games

Let’s talk luck. Many games have some factor of luck or another, and people’s attitudes towards luck can be a major factor with respect to how fast they do or don’t improve. I would say that this does not much apply to games that do not involve elements of chance, but people somehow find ways to blame luck in those games as well!

Impacts of Luck

There are many different ways in which games can incorporate luck. Here are just a few:

• In card games, your draws can have a big impact on what options you have available — and some cards may have further aspects of chance via random discards, dice roll mechanics, etc.

• In miniatures games, attacks are frequently determined by the result of dice rolls. For instance, a squad of Stormtroopers in Star Wars: Legion will roll several dice (potentially of varying types) to see how many hits they can score when attacking, and they will roll dice for defense as well to try and protect themselves from hits the opponent inflicts.

• In computer strategy games, there are often multiple relevant aspects of randomness — XCOM is well known for its random hit chances, while in a game like Civilization there are other important factors (your spawn location, Ruins bonuses, etc.).

In many games, these factors can be quite important. Note that different games can have extremely different amounts of luck or “variance”, even within the same type or genre — Magic: the Gathering for instance is infamous for “mana flood” and “mana screw”, a situation where having too little (or too many) resource cards can prevent you from taking other meaningful actions; by contrast, Flesh and Blood TCG also has elements of luck, but the impact of having an “all red hand” or “all blue hand” (FAB’s equivalent of mana screw/mana flood) is far less, as it tends to go away after a turn or so rather than persisting throughout the game.

Note that some games also include cards or mechanics that can be used to mitigate luck. These can be important to make use of! For instance, Flesh and Blood TCG has some cards that roll dice to determine their effects, especially in the Brute class. However, Flesh and Blood also has Gambler’s Gloves, a card that allows you to reroll a die — this card can be key when playing with (or against!) cards that have crucial dice roll mechanics.

For instance, Brute’s Scabskin Leathers have a powerful effect but a one in six chance to end your turn immediately (very bad) — with Gambler’s Gloves backing you up, you can turn that one in six chance into a one in thirty-six and hence roll the Leathers much more safely!

Scabskin Leathers can give you extra actions, but using it takes your action point, so rolling a one ends your turn…

…however, Gambler’s Gloves can let you reroll the die on Scabskins, giving you a much lower chance to lose a turn.

(above card images are © Legend Story Studios.)

That said, even the best luck mitigation tricks don’t always work — in fact, I’ve both played and cast games where a player tried to use the Scabskin Leathers and Gambler’s Gloves combo, only to roll a one both times and lose their turn anyway. While there is less than a three percent chance for this to occur (it’s a one in thirty-six), sometimes the dice really can just turn out that way!

Now, luck in games tends to be just one factor among many — but because it makes an easy external scapegoat, people often focus on it as to blame for their losses.

Blaming Luck for Defeats

While many games have luck, few of these games have luck in a way that is totally decisive. Magic’s mana screw is an unusually strong example that really can decide a game “on its own”. Even very unlucky breaks in most other games are unlikely to outright decide the game. That said, they can still be frustrating and force someone to adapt. This leads to an interesting phenomenon — generally speaking, players are much more likely to blame luck for defeats than they “should be”. By fixating on some unlucky moment that happened in the game — a unit rolling a bad set of saves, an opponent getting a strong draw, etc. — it is easy to blame external factors for your defeat.

In general, I think that the impulse to say “oh, you got lucky/I got unlucky” is a dangerous one. Yes, this can be comforting, and sometimes it’s even true! However, blaming external factors may make yourself feel better, but it tends to be a bad way to improve. It is generally more productive to focus on what you could have done better — it is very rare to have a situation where you really did play a perfect game and lost purely and only thanks to an unlucky break. Note also that some genres of game, like fighting games, have substantially less luck than others, in some cases essentially none. However, players still manage to blame luck for their losses in those scenarios as well — in my view substantial evidence that the overall tendency is often to blame luck when you shouldn’t!

In the long run, I think you will progress more if you focus not on moments of bad luck, but rather on ways in which you can improve — even on relatively minor details. A player who draws lessons for improvement can in my view do much better than a player who shrugs his shoulders, blames the dice, and moves on.

That said, while it’s important not to blame luck all the time, there are some cases where you should blame luck! For instance…

Realizing When You Got Lucky

In the final round of the Las Vegas Open tournament for Star Wars: Legion in 2018., I was paired against my friend Nema. I believe Nema and I were both undefeated (he might have been X-1?), and the structure of this tournament meant that the winner of our game would receive an invite to the High Command Invitational at Adepticon! With tournament fatigue setting in after playing Legion for something like twelve hours already that day (!), I made a blunder that allowed Nema to secure a large advantage against me — it ended up with a situation where I would have to have my forces attack into his defensive position. To make matters worse, this would render one of my units (an immobile but powerful defensive gun) near-useless, as the primary conflict would likely occur outside of its range! With the invite on the line, this was a tough spot for me to be in.

However, the game really turned around when I had a very lucky break — one of Nema’s units triggered a land mine, which then went on to wipe the entire squad! (In Legion, mines are sometimes placed during setup and usually do such little damage after hit/save rolls that triggering them is common and they’re often treated as a somewhat minor nuisance. This mine did way above average damage — in fact the maximum possible — killing all four members of the squad when the average is probably ~one casualty.) With Nema a squad down, I was now the one who would win if nothing else happened. This gave me an opportunity to begin retreating and playing defensively, and now Nema was the one who had to cross the board and attack into my defenses — what’s more, that immobile gun that wasn’t going to help me attack now faced a situation where enemies were charging into its range. While the game didn’t outright end there, I was able to hold out on defense to secure the win and the invite.

Nema about to make the fateful move… (screencap taken from Impact X’s video coverage)

Now, while I won that game, it would be foolish of me to conclude that I won because I had outplayed my opponent. In fact, I made a major blunder and prevailed thanks to two lucky breaks — first, Nema (himself suffering from tournament fatigue!) did not position his unit to guarantee it would survive the mine, allowing me to potentially get lucky with the dice. Secondly, when Nema’s unit triggered the mine, the odds of the whole squad being wiped out were very low — in fact, my calculations indicate that it was a bit less than a 1% chance! However, I got the rolls I needed to wipe out the squad and reverse the state of the game.

In situations like this, it’s important that you don’t think “oh, I won so it’s all good” or whatever. Instead, recognize that you lucked out and try to figure out how to avoid being in a position where you have to luck out to get the win!

Conclusion and Caveats

In general, I think that one will improve faster if oriented towards evaluating one’s own performance rather than lucky or unlucky breaks that happened in a game. While luck can influence the outcomes of many games, it isn’t the only decisive factor. In order to improve, you should focus on whether or not you made the right choices in expectation, not what the outcome was. This may be an odd mindset to grasp, but it is important to improving — if you made a choice that had a 90% chance of success, that was the best choice available to you, and the 10% failure chance came up, that doesn’t mean you necessarily did something wrong!

Similarly, if I win or gain a large advantage in a game where I was otherwise behind thanks to a dice roll that has a less than 1% chance of occurring — as happened with my game against Nema at LVO — that doesn’t mean I made the right choices at at all. In fact, that game was a major learning experience for me despite my victory, since I realized how lucky I’d been to succeed!

I once heard professional poker player Chris Sparks say that in the world of poker — a game where luck and your strategy around it plays a major role — it is sometimes considered improper to actually describe the end result of a play when talking about the strategy and decision-making around what you did! This is a good example of trying to improve by focusing on your choices and processes rather than on the outcomes. (I’ve sometimes seen this characterized as “process-oriented” vs. “results-oriented” thinking.)

Now, are there times where you really did make the absolute best choice available and then get unlucky? Sure, of course this can happen. and sometimes there isn’t much else to evaluate. However, given the tendency to blame luck too much rather than too little, I think that you should be suspicious about this sort of thing and only conclude it’s the case when you’re really sure. You’ll generally do better by focusing on evaluating your decisions and how you can improve them rather than on bemoaning your unlucky breaks.