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Backgammon more of a "game of skill" now than in the past?
Posted By: Albert Steg In Response To: Backgammon more of a "game of skill" now than in the past? (Timothy Chow)
Date: Tuesday, 13 January 2015, at 6:15 p.m.
Timothy -- I think your terms are a little bit muddied, conceptually, because you introduce the concept of "Gambling" to the usual Luck/Skill duality. By setting "Gambling" in opposition to "Game of Skill" you wind up implying that gambling activities do not involve skill -- which is true for, say, slot machines and scratch cards -- but not backgammon or poker or golf where skill is clearly a major factor. Yet you apply it to backgammon, which is arguably not gambling at all.
'Gambling' I might take as the activity of wagering $ on an outcome that has yet to be determined -- whether by luck or skill. But "wagering" is a better word for this. If a chess master bets $10 on a game with a beginner is he "gambling"? Arguably, he is not -- but he is most certainly *wagering*.
"Gambling" therefore must be something different from "wagering" and I would suggest it involves staking money on outcomes that are not sufficiently within your own control for you to meaningfully influence the outcome. Buying a lotto card, or playing any game in a casino (short of effectively counting cards in blackjack) are most definitely gambling. Sports betting I would say is gambling, although there may be some skill in prediction involved. Some people bring a gambling attitude toward investing in stocks, but I would not describe buying shares of ownership in a company as gambling -- it is not a wager, it is an investment (you actually take ownership of something that you later intend to sell at a profit). Buying toys with the intention of selling them as collectibles in the future is not wagering or gambling, it is also investing (bad investing).
So back to backgammon - my take is it is unchanged by the general improvement in Skill levels:
In the short run, backgammon is substantially a luck game. In the long run, backgammon is overwhelmingly a skill game.
I don't think it makes sense to characterize the game in general by a luck %, but I might suggest something like:
In a 1-pt match the game is 90% luck In a 5-pt match the game is 50% luck In a 13-pt match the game is 25% luck In a heads-up $ game session of 1000 games the game is 2% luck.
The numbers are just impressionistic suggestions to illustrate a point, not based on some quantifiable thing -- the longer the sample size, the less luck is involved.
Anyone who wishes backgammon were more a matter of pure skill should think twice. There's no doubling cube in chess and where's the fun in that?
Albert
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