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Insightful comment about luck versus skill

Posted By: Rich Munitz
Date: Sunday, 15 August 2010, at 3:49 p.m.

In Response To: Insightful comment about luck versus skill (Perry Gartner)

Of course, looking at who has earned the most at golf over the course of the year will be a better measure of skill than who won a single event.

But considering that the typical major golf event is likely to be won by a single stroke and one must ask if that was simply the best player, or the one that got the better breaks.

I still maintain that it is performance volatility that is in control of these outcomes more than any other factor. The average PR of a golfer and the length of contest is what tends to ensure that the leaders in an event tend to be the better players, but lesser names also can creep into contention or even win.

Take a population of "non-Giant" golf players with say a 20% chance of beating par on a typical hole and a 25% chance of exceeding par, and there is a purely random chance that one of these players will beat par 6 times and exceed par 1 time. That nobody may win the tournament. Sure, one may say that they played great golf that week, but as in backgammon, sometimes a player simply gets lucky and hits all their shots. You can call it skill, but to me and to the bookies it is indistinguishable from chance.

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