Sorry davidmil, but I think hunting is all about luck. I'll try to explain this, but it all boils down to being in the right place at the right time, which is another way of saying being lucky.

(I think a really interesting thread here would be a study on this issue. Ask the following questions in a poll on here: How many days did you you hunt last year? What state did you hunt in? What age buck did you kill?
Then if we got a large enough sample size, a real stat cruncher - I could do it in a pinch - could run some correlations.)

Anyhow, I'll bet my newest set of thermal longjohns that such a study would find a monster correlation between the most successful hunters and the guys who spent the most time out there. In short, these guys are maximizing their luck by spending lots of hours in the woods, rolling the dice a lot. If you gotta roll snake eyes to win, who are you betting on - the guy who rolls the dice once or twice, or the guy who rolls it twenty or thirty times?

Suppose the best hunter in the world sees a P&Y buck every 20 hours he's in the woods, and a novice hunts the same woods but only sees a book buck every 100 hours, both hunters are still playing on luck, it's just that the good hunter is playing at a higher level of luck than the novice. Back to the dice illustration, the good hunter wins every time he rolls '6' and the novice only wins on snake eyes. Does it make the game not a game of luck because the good hunter is essentially playing by a different set of rules? I don't think so.