In any case, the difference is not between tennis and poker, and it is not based on ethical boundaries (I do not have strong opinions about whether gambling should be legal). The difference is between high stakes negative- expected-rewards games and high stakes games where players expect positive rewards
That’s absolutely fine. Just don’t call it skill versus luck. Come up with new words to express the concepts you think are important; these names are taken.
The conventional way does not give you a way to measure the ingredients of skill and luck
Yes it does; one piece of evidence that tennis involves less luck than golf is that in match-play tournaments of about the same size, you’re much more likely for a golfer outside the top 10 to win than for a tennis player outside the top 10 to win.
Or that baseball involves more luck than basketball, because a streak of (say) 27 wins in 30 games is much more common for a top team in basketball than baseball.
(Yes, there are differences in how level various playing fields are, but these phenomena seem to be robust across competition in high school, college and professional levels (AFAICT), so it seems like strong evidence to me. If it were important to me, I could start finding more and more objective metrics of skill versus luck in various games.)
Very good. The conventional ways you propose to measure luck and skill ingredients are precisely the same as what I would use.So my notions are consistent with the usual ones. When you say that baseball involves more luck that basketball your notion depend on the entire scenario and reward systems and not just on the rules of the games precisely as I suggest
the new ingredient in my analysis is that these measures may not be robust if we change the reward system.
Perhaps a better way to explain myself is by looking at what I’d consider a sign of how much skill is involved in a game: roughly speaking, how many different strata of players are there for a widely played game, where each stratum can beat the stratum below (let’s say) 90% of the time? There’s only one stratum for Candyland, and at most three (humanly speaking) for tic-tac-toe, but numerous strata for a game like tennis.
So we can think of luck-vs-skill also in the sense that tennis is more stratified than golf, because a few PGA players have a 10% or better chance of beating Tiger on a given weekend, and many PGA players have a 10% or better chance of beating one of those players, and a top amateur or college golfer has a 10% chance of beating one of those players, and so on down; while there seem to be more layers than that in tennis.
Now, high-stakes games can cause a selection bias wherein all lower strata will withdraw from a competition, but this doesn’t change the components of skill and luck for that game; if you forced the withdrawing players to play for those high stakes, you’d see similar results as you’d see for low stakes (neglecting psychological effects of the fear of a bigger loss, but your analysis doesn’t seem to incorporate these). The usual concepts of skill and luck are defined by what would happen if X played against Y; your analysis is about something else, which determines whether X plays in the first place. So please call it something else.
So my notions are consistent with the usual ones. When you say that baseball involves more luck that basketball your notion depend on the entire scenario and reward systems and not just on the rules of the games.
No. Orthonormal said nothing of the sort. He just listed ways to check whether a game is skill or luck based, and didn’t claim that the critical factor is the reward system.
I suggest you spend less effort trying to look like you were right all along and just admit, “Okay, I used the terms differently from how they’re normally used.” Is it really that hard? It’s the least you could do given such a misleading title.
That’s absolutely fine. Just don’t call it skill versus luck. Come up with new words to express the concepts you think are important; these names are taken.
Yes it does; one piece of evidence that tennis involves less luck than golf is that in match-play tournaments of about the same size, you’re much more likely for a golfer outside the top 10 to win than for a tennis player outside the top 10 to win.
Or that baseball involves more luck than basketball, because a streak of (say) 27 wins in 30 games is much more common for a top team in basketball than baseball.
(Yes, there are differences in how level various playing fields are, but these phenomena seem to be robust across competition in high school, college and professional levels (AFAICT), so it seems like strong evidence to me. If it were important to me, I could start finding more and more objective metrics of skill versus luck in various games.)
Very good. The conventional ways you propose to measure luck and skill ingredients are precisely the same as what I would use.So my notions are consistent with the usual ones. When you say that baseball involves more luck that basketball your notion depend on the entire scenario and reward systems and not just on the rules of the games precisely as I suggest the new ingredient in my analysis is that these measures may not be robust if we change the reward system.
Perhaps a better way to explain myself is by looking at what I’d consider a sign of how much skill is involved in a game: roughly speaking, how many different strata of players are there for a widely played game, where each stratum can beat the stratum below (let’s say) 90% of the time? There’s only one stratum for Candyland, and at most three (humanly speaking) for tic-tac-toe, but numerous strata for a game like tennis.
So we can think of luck-vs-skill also in the sense that tennis is more stratified than golf, because a few PGA players have a 10% or better chance of beating Tiger on a given weekend, and many PGA players have a 10% or better chance of beating one of those players, and a top amateur or college golfer has a 10% chance of beating one of those players, and so on down; while there seem to be more layers than that in tennis.
Now, high-stakes games can cause a selection bias wherein all lower strata will withdraw from a competition, but this doesn’t change the components of skill and luck for that game; if you forced the withdrawing players to play for those high stakes, you’d see similar results as you’d see for low stakes (neglecting psychological effects of the fear of a bigger loss, but your analysis doesn’t seem to incorporate these). The usual concepts of skill and luck are defined by what would happen if X played against Y; your analysis is about something else, which determines whether X plays in the first place. So please call it something else.
No. Orthonormal said nothing of the sort. He just listed ways to check whether a game is skill or luck based, and didn’t claim that the critical factor is the reward system.
I suggest you spend less effort trying to look like you were right all along and just admit, “Okay, I used the terms differently from how they’re normally used.” Is it really that hard? It’s the least you could do given such a misleading title.