While every sport obviously requires a very high level of skill and years of dedication, there are a lot of sports that also require a lot of luck to be successful in. This luck can involve the weather, your opponent misreading what you are about to do or any one of a number of things that are out of your control.
While the luck of the Irish seems to apply mainly to team sports, there are a few instances when it applies to individual sports as well. Here are the sports that require a lot of luck for success.
Golf
Golf has always been famous as one of those sports that you spend your entire life trying to master and you never reach the day where you play absolutely perfectly. This is because even though you need a ton of skill and years of experience, golf requires a boat load of luck.For one, you play outside and you play with a small ball. A small object and strong wind do not make a good team, and no matter how good your shot is, a gust of wind at the wrong time will turn a ball that was hitting the middle of the fairway into a ball that lands in the water or a tree.
Professionals can't escape this - no-one can escape the elements - and there isn't any game where the weather can quite literally make or break your tournament. There are countless examples of players leading by a few shots finishing out of the top 30 because of poor weather.
Baseball
At its core, baseball is a simple sport, with the most runs on the board at the end of the ninth inning. While getting to that point does take a professional level of skill, a ton of luck is also required.
First off, you need to hit a pitch, which is far harder than the pro's make it look, secondly, you have to hope you have a proper connection or it is just getting caught, and thirdly, if it doesn't go for a home run, you are most likely out then too.
Pitchers have the advantage, almost by default. Being able to combine hitting the ball, hitting it in the sweet spot of the bat and going far enough to score runs, has a lot more luck involved than one might think.
Soccer
Soccer is another team sport that has so much luck involved sometimes it's almost a joke. While obviously skill takes precedence, there is no denying that luck plays a huge factor in whether or not a team wins sometimes.Prime examples being Diego Maradona's famous "Hand of God" goal that refs somehow didn't spot, or the Frank Lampard goal against Germany that clearly bounced over the line a couple of times but was still disallowed.
Deflected shots and lucky touches are also commonplace, as well as players trying a frankly ridiculous shot and it somehow working - Olivier Giroud's scorpion kick goal for instance. Skill has a place in football, but luck is definitely a huge part of the game
Chess
Chess is surprisingly a game that does require a lot of luck, but is an individual game. Individual games, barring golf, don't require luck as you have far more control of your surroundings.Chess, on the other hand, can be won by you outplaying your opponent half the time, or taking advantage of a mistake they made the other half. In a game like tennis for example, a mistake usually just ends in you losing a point, in chess, a mistake usually leads to you losing the whole game.
There is no denying that chess is a highly skilled game, but luck definitely has its place, and once again, it is far more common to win though luck than one might think at first.
eSports
eSports are also highly luck based, in particular, Battle Royale style games. Think of Fortnite or Call of Duty Warzone, if you have played them, how many times have you been saved because another player or team entered a fight and killed the opponent about to kill you?More examples would be getting lucky with where the in-game circle moves, getting lucky with finding the right loot at the right time. This kind of stuff is often just given the general term of "RNG", or simply put, luck.
Every sport with a league or table
Some may forget how much luck is involved sometimes in winning a league or advancing through a tournament. The reason why this is luck based is simple, you are relying on one or more teams to win or lose certain games.Think of any tournament that has group stages. Portugal were able to get out of their group at the 2018 Euro tournament without winning a game simply because of how poorly other teams did. Any time you have to rely on the success or failure of one or more teams to advance your position, obviously that is luck.
While there are definitely more sports that require some luck, these are the ones that require an almost abnormal amount of luck most of the time. While there is skill involved, Lady Luck will always play a part.
