Our recent determination of a Salpeter slope for the IMF in the field of 30 Doradus [ ] appears to be in conflict with simple probabilistic counting arguments advanced in the past to support observational claims of a steeper IMF in the LMC field .
In this paper we re-examine these arguments and show by explicit construction that , contrary to these claims , the field IMF is expected to be exactly the same as the stellar IMF of the clusters out of which the field was presumably formed .
We show that the current data on the mass distribution of clusters themselves is in excellent agreement with our model , and is consistent with a single spectrum by number of stars of the type n ^ { \beta } with \beta between -1.8 and -2.2 down to the smallest clusters without any preferred mass scale for cluster formation .
We also use the random sampling model to estimate the statistics of the maximal mass star in clusters , and confirm the discrepancy with observations found by .
We argue that rather than signaling the violation of the random sampling model these observations reflect the gravitationally unstable nature of systems with one very large mass star .
We stress the importance of the random sampling model as a null hypothesis whose violation would signal the presence of interesting physics .