Serral for example is the current best StarCraft 2 player in the world. They operate in tournaments where X players face off usually starting with 16+ players doing single elimination. He won 4 regional, and 2 international tournaments in a row. The odds of him pulling that off if the odds of each win where close to 50/50 would be ~1/(2^30) aka 1 billion to 1. Instead, he was heavily favored in most of these match ups.
Between "tanking" (teams that are deliberately bad in order to get better draft picks), massive budget differences (it's not unusual to see large-market teams with payrolls more than double those of small-market teams), and structural issues in the games themselves, parity can be very very difficult to achieve. 538 attempts to use chess-style Elo ratings to track the major sports, and currently they have:
* ~200-point difference between best and worst major-league baseball team
* ~400-point difference between best and worst NFL football team
* ~400-point difference between best and worst NBA basketball team
However I agree that HN is not the most efficient venue for chess strategy analysis
In reality, pro games have such strong contenders that each have very thin edge, if at all, and the outcome is usually just same as throwing dice.