When ENCE made the finals of the IEM Katowice Major in February, the team was ranked #9 in the HLTV world rankings. Regardless of one’s opinion on ENCE prior to the Major playoffs, it would be folly to deny that this fantastic result was unexpected.

Now, in recent Major history, there’s been two other surprises of comparable magnitude: Gambit and Immortals as the finalists of the PGL Krakow Major in 2017, and Cloud9 as the winner of the Boston Major. In all three of these cases, pundits referred to the successful runs as flukes. And again, in all three of these cases, this brought about a kerfuffle.

At first glance, there should be no kerfuffle here. After all, all of these runs were unlikely, and a poor indicator of future performance. Indeed, all three of Immortals, Gambit, and Cloud9 never replicated the success they found in their respective runs, and each roster imploded within a few months of its most impressive performance. Looking at what Cloud9 did after the Major, what could possibly be controversial about calling its run a fluke?

And yet, it is controversial to call C9’s run a fluke. This article’s central claim will be that the word fluke has two faces, one predictive and derisive, and that the kerfuffle we see comes from readers erroneously taking statements of the first kind to be or imply statements of the second.

When (most) pundits call the C9 run a fluke, they mean that that placing was not a good indicator of subsequent results for that team. For short, it means “this won’t happen again”. Note that this may express one of three underlying claims: (1) that Cloud9’s level of performance, even if it persists, will not be enough to reach comparable success in the future, (2) that Cloud’s level of performance will not persist, or (3) Cloud9’s level wasn’t even high enough to win this Major i.e they got lucky. When a pundit says that run was a fluke, they usually mean either (1) or (2).

In which cases can it be said that each of these three claims is true?

Claim (1), that Cloud9’s level of performance at the Major will not be enough to earn them subsequent (comparable) success, is made true or false by the level of performance of other teams. To put it in artificial terms, let’s say that Cloud9’s performance at the Boston Major was an 8.8/10. At that Major, C9 played G2, SK and FaZe. Say that, against C9, G2’s level of performance was a 6.5/10, SK’s was an 8.5/10, and FaZe’s was an 8.7/10. In such a situation, Cloud9’s performance was sufficient to win the Major. What is being claimed in (1), is that in subsequent Tier 1 tournaments, 8.8/10 will not be enough to win the trophy. That may happen for many reasons. For one, you may think that FaZe underperformed in that final and that in the next tournament they’ll at least be a 9/10. Second, you may think that other teams are on the rise, and that once SK Gaming played with boltz (recall that felps was a stand-in at that major), they’d become a 9/10 team. In essence, Claim (1) is that the level of competition at the Major was weaker then it will be in future tournaments.

I dubbed as Claim (2) the assertion that Cloud9’s performance at the Major was higher than it will be in subsequent tournaments — the team overperformed in Boston. To maintain the analogy created in the last paragraph, we can say that Claim (2) is true if Cloud9 was an 8.8 at the Major, but will average out at about 7.6 ( or any other number notably below 8.8) in subsequent tournaments.

Claim (3) is that C9 got lucky. This…is a tricky one, and in order to create a formal truth-condition, I’m going to have to explain some basic concepts in probability theory. When you make a decision, you know that this could lead to various outcomes. If I buy a mouse on Amazon, I might love it and I might hate it. Those are two of the plethora of possible outcomes of my purchase. When I buy it, I presumably think it more likely that I will like it than not. If it’s more likely that my action has a positive outcome than a negative one, we may say that it has a positive expected value. Now, it’s very important to note that expected value does not correspond to actual value. If there was an 85% I loved this mouse, and I bought it for cheap, I was right to buy it. But of course, there’s a world (15% of worlds) in which I don’t like it, even if it made sense that I buy it. Now, take the Boston Major final between C9 and FaZe. One might claim that C9’s play yielded a negative expected value, e.g they only had a 10% chance of winning playing the way they did. This is perhaps what folks have in mind when they say: “play that series ten times over, C9 would probably only win once.” If this is true, C9 got lucky because the actual value of its play was higher than the expected value.

Claim (3) however, is more concrete when applied to who the team played, rather than how they played against them. I think the most appropriate use of Claim (3) is to point out cases in which a team had an easy bracket. For example, both SK and Na’Vi made it to the Top 4 of the ELEAGUE Boston Major, but played opponents of a different calibre to get there. We shouldn’t give Na’Vi as much credit for beating Quantum Bellator Fire as we give to SK for beating Fnatic. In cases of uneven brackets, Claim (3) is appropriately used to point out that equivalent placings do not imply equivalent merit.

When a pundit calls C9’s Major run a fluke, they almost certainly mean one of these three things. Their claim falls under the predictive face of the world “fluke”, because they more or less imply the same conclusion — -this won’t happen again.

Now, I posit that fluke-claims cause a kerfuffle because many people who hear these predictive arguments take them to be making a claim about merit: C9 didn’t deserve to win the Boston Major. The merit claim is something of a chimera, because it can be taken up as a modified version of any of argument (1), (2) or (3). More specifically, the merit claim can use any of these three as premises to support its own argument. I could say that C9 won’t win another major tournament while being comfortable with their win — but I could also use the claim that C9 won’t win another tournament to motivate the sentiment that didn’t deserve to win this one.

Why would these predictive claims motivate the idea that C9 didn’t deserve to win the Major? For my money, the idea of desert (as in merit, not cheesecake) goes to the heart of why we care about trophies in the first place. Elsewhere, I’ve argued that trophies have value because they serve as symbols of excellence. Using this as a working hypothesis, we can understand how any of (1), (2) or (3) could support (though not necessarily imply) the thought that C9 didn’t deserve the Major.

We all have some standards about how good Major-winning teams should be. It’s the biggest tournament in the sport, and it’s meant to reward the very best. If either (1) or (2) is true, then C9 was the best team at the tournament, but won’t be in future tournaments. Insofar as Majors stick out in our mind, we may say that C9 didn’t deserve the Major because winning it will give (and, in retrospect, has given) a false impression of how good that team was overall. While I think that this is true, the responsibility for accurate valuations lies with our future selves, not with C9. The Major trophy is (hopefully) given to the best team at that tournament — in itself, it says nothing about the quality of the winning team at other tournaments, or overall. If we overrate C9 because of their Major win, it’s because we’ve poorly judged the contribution a Major win provides to excellence. The mistake (if it is a mistake) in thinking that C9 was the best NA team of all-time lies not in an undeserved Major win, but in our poor judgement.

Predictably, it is Claim (3) — -that C9 got lucky — -that gives the most weight to the claim that they didn’t deserve the Major. It follows trivially from the fact that C9 didn’t provide the most expected value in their play that C9 wasn’t the best team at the tournament (where “best team” is equivalent to “played the best”). Given our working hypothesis, a team deserves a trophy if and only if they were the best team at the tournament. If C9 wasn’t the best team at that tournament, they didn’t deserve to win it.

Now, this is not meant to settle whether or not ENCE’s or C9’s runs were in fact flukes. This article was a taxonomy of what one might be claiming when one says they are (or aren’t). We’ve seen that the claim that C9 didn’t deserve the Major is only implied by the claim that C9 got lucky. In listening to pundits, then, we should only take the label ‘fluke’ to be derisive if it is meant as this kind of claim. The thing is…it almost never is. Few people would say that ENCE was lucky to reach the final of the Major, especially given the fact that they had a very difficult bracket run. They earned that Top 2 finish. What is (much more plausibly) claimed by pundits is that ENCE won’t replicate a result of this quality. Since that is not a comment on their merit, we should stop interpreting fluke claims as insults to the teams toward which they are directed.