Luck and Tilt in Hearthstone

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“If there weren’t luck involved, I’d win every time.” – Phil Hellmuth

This classic quote from Phil Hellmuth, of poker fame, can be a very relatable concept to Hearthstone players. All card games are designed in a way to allow for luck to be a factor in the outcome of games. This is not a design flaw, but a feature. If you took all of the chance out of card games, they would no longer be card games, but chess. While chess is obviously a classic game, it does not have the mass appeal that a game like Hearthstone has. Why is this? One factor is that anyone can win a game of Hearthstone eventually due to the randomness of which cards are drawn. Yes, the better player will win most of the time, but they won’t win every time. This is essentially not the case with a game like chess. The better player will almost always win when you get to a certain level in chess.

Randomness which allows the lesser player to win is a GOOD thing, as long as the better player wins most of the time. People would not play Hearthstone if they lost 90% of the time or more. Imagine how quickly you would quit if you faced that loss rate! Luckily, Hearthstone has a healthy dose of randomness which keeps the player base strong, and thus the game strong. Between opening hands, which cards are drawn throughout the game, and cards with random elements built in, there is just enough space for a lesser player to get lucky and win enough to not be completely discouraged from playing.

Given these ideas, you cannot let losses that look to have been decided by luck affect your play. If you are a winning player, you have to accept the fact that you will still lose at least to 40-45% of the time when it comes to ladder play. Still, it is quite natural to get frustrated when you lose a game due to a “lucky top deck” or an RNG moment from a card. The better you handle these situations, the higher your win-rate will be.

To win in Hearthstone, you need a winning mindset. Where is your head at as you play the game? If you find yourself tilted, or frustrated, after a tough loss, don’t fire off that next game right away! It is critical to avoid playing when tilted, as you will inevitably make more mistakes and compound your losing ways. Conversely, when you are winning and have a lot of confidence, you want to keep playing and riding that wave as long as possible.

One way to keep tilt from affecting you is to consciously focus your mental energy on only the things you can control as you play. You can’t control what the top card of your opponent’s deck is, nor your own. Do the best you can with the information that you have, and when looking back at your losses, try to find any decision points you could have made differently. You might need to look all the way back at your mulligan decision, or even the cards you drafted or selected for your deck to find where you could have improved.

It is so easy to just point to a “lucky moment” and blame your loss on that. Being able to blame losses on luck, rather than their own mistakes, is another reason people keep playing card games. Doing this allows a player to preserve their ego and sense of self-worth in the short term. Randomness is a great scapegoat for losing in card games, and sometimes it may be the actual reason for a loss, but usually there is something that could have been done differently to give you a better chance at winning. Finding those things consistently, and improving on them, is what will make you a better player over time. It also isn’t an easy thing to do. Who wants to go back in their own head and analyze their decisions when they just had a frustrating loss? It is certainly a skill that needs to be developed over time, but as you focus on the things you could have done differently, you will find yourself both making less mistakes and being less affected by tilt.

Just remember that no one can win 100% of the time, or even 80% of the time, over the long haul. All you can do is try to improve by a percentage point here and there over time, and before you know it you will be crushing Hearthstone games left and right!

If you have any Hearthstone questions, feel free to ask me on Twitter: @bchap55. I might even address them in a future article!

Thanks for reading,

Ben Chapman