| |
BGonline.org Forums
Insightful comment about luck versus skill
Posted By: mamabear In Response To: Insightful comment about luck versus skill (Steve Mellen)
Date: Sunday, 15 August 2010, at 3:13 a.m.
Perhaps the dividing line in golf is that any out-of-norm event arising from the course, as opposed to the human beings (player or opponent), can be called luck. Such events can include any way the ball sinks, flies, or maybe swims that is due to the fact the air isn't perfectly still, the course surface isn't perfectly smooth, and the ball isn't mathematically spherical aside from its indentations, which in turn aren't the precise shape and size they should be. You or your opponent having a bad night's sleep would not qualify, nor the fact you had a road rage incident on the way over to the country club.
But there would still be gray areas. What about you or your opponent hitting a gopher hole with your golf cart and flipping it over, causing you to be shaky for the next few strokes? Hitting the gopher hole was bad luck, and it occurred because of a deviation from perfect smoothness of the golf course, but it didn't directly affect the game or anyone's score. This is not the same thing as one of you getting stung by a bee just as you were 1mm from connecting with the ball, since you'd certainly say that unavoidably affected that one stroke.
I haven't seen it mentioned in this thread yet, my apologies if someone already brought it up, but it's hard to make apples-to-apples comparisons regarding skill vs. luck between a game where you play mainly against the course or some functional equivalent: archery, skeet shooting, golf, cross country running, and discus throwing; and a game where you play mainly against the opponent(s): tennis, baseball, basketball, Go, and chess.
In yet another class you have backgammon, where the dice are a much bigger factor than who you are playing, but opponent factors do come into play; however, the dice aren't at all the equivalent of a "course", since what they will give you to work with is unknown to you until you roll them. Then there is poker, where IINM the opponent factor is quite a bit larger but you are also playing against Fortuna in the form of the cards.
I don't have a solution for how to measure luck and skill for any of the above games, so this is just a note that I think it's especially difficult across these category lines.
| |
BGonline.org Forums is maintained by Stick with WebBBS 5.12.