Board Game Arena

RazorOz wrote: ↑17 October 2026, 00:16 I can pretty much tell you that is how Arena works. I have won Heat Arena 11 seasons in a row, it's not because I am going on a lucky streak every season. Heat is a game with some luck, but still a lot more skill-based than high luck games. If you have the highest win rate at a game like that, you will win in Arena pretty much as long as you play enough games to reach your level, that's why a lot of the same players repeatedly win in Arena. I know from experience when I have tried playing significantly more games to try and increase my Arena ranking it doesn't work, I just end up going round in circles.

See the part I added to my last post. Your case is very specific, because if you won Arena so many times it clearly suggests you are in a different category from everyone else. So in your personal case, you don't need to extend your luck, you just need to reach your expected score. Then it's others who have to extend their luck to catch up to you. But given the gap may be quite large, the odds of getting enough consecutive wins for them to do so may be very low, which is why it has never happened.

In most games though, it's going to be unlikely that someone is clearly better than everyone else. Usually it's more like there's a group of top players who are roughly the same level, so the number of games played and the streaks achieved will have a large influence on which one of those players will win.

RazorOz wrote: ↑17 October 2026, 00:16 I know from experience when I have tried playing significantly more games to try and increase my Arena ranking it doesn't work, I just end up going round in circles.

Regarding that part, what I mean is that if your true level is say at 2000 points, any game you win starting from that number is going to add more points. If you win one more game, maybe you'll be at 2010. If you win 20 more games in a row, maybe you'll be at 2100.

To you it probably doesn't matter, because other players have always been behind you, so you've never had to extend your luck to try to get much higher than your normal number.

But now imagine there is another player who is just as good as you. You'd both be around 2000, so you'd both be trying to play a ton more games to try to increase this number as high as you can. At some point one of you may manage to get to a number that seems unrealistic for the other to ever reach, and so they decide to stop playing.

That's what Arena is like for most people. For everyone who is not so far above everyone that they just need to reach their expected score, the final race is all about putting out games and hoping for win streaks.

Your perspective is as if Magnus Carlsen said "being the world Elo leader is not about luck streak, you just need to be at your normal level". That statement only holds true for him, since he is notably better than every other player. For everyone else, reaching the world top Elo would require a major win streak to surpass Carlsen's Elo.