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BGonline.org Forums
PR or Luck? Here is the real answer if you are looking for (Long but informative)
Posted By: Timothy Chow In Response To: PR or Luck? Here is the real answer if you are looking for (Long but informative) (__1ERROR1__)
Date: Thursday, 11 February 2016, at 1:38 a.m.
As others have pointed out, your qualitative conclusions about luck and skill are unsurprising. We might quibble with your
faultyidiosyncratic decision to focus on score differential rather than just the win/loss outcome, but even if thatbug were fixedfeature were changed, I'm sure the conclusion would be essentially the same.On the other hand, I do think you misunderstand the implications of your findings.
There are two classes of games that are very different sociologically. In the past I've called these classes "gambling games" and "games of skill" but these terms were misunderstood, so I'm going to introduce some new terminology. Certain games are what I'll call "status games" and other games are what I'll call "sucker games."
Chess and go are status games. The way you demonstrate success is by beating everyone else and thereby showing that you're the top banana.
Backgammon, in the "old days," was a sucker game. The path to success was to convince the fish that the game was all just a matter of luck, and then to have the fish for lunch.
In the old days, your study would have been welcomed by the pros. Here, at last, would be scientific proof that it's the luckier player who always wins. Even a skeptical fish would be hard-pressed to find fault with such an immaculate, professorially-approved, scientific study. Far from feeling the need to change the game to make it more skill-based, the pros would be delighted at this new sucker bait.
The only reason this logic doesn't work so well in today's world is that bots have had two irreversible effects. (1) They have made it harder for people to fool themselves into thinking that they're better than they really are. (2) They have improved the general level of play, thereby decreasing the edge that the sharks have over the fish.
Backgammon is therefore gradually evolving from a sucker game into a status game. This is unfortunately rather difficult because its origin as a sucker game means that luck is built into its very structure. Tinkering with the rules to try to reduce the luck will probably not work very well. If you were to try various rule adjustments and run your study again, chances are that the conclusion would still be that an edge in skill would take "too long" to manifest itself. The best chance of survival, IMO, is to go in the direction that the game has already been going, which is to use error rate as a basis for rebuilding backgammon as a status game.
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