I’d throw in test cricket.
There is a big disparity between professional league cricket and international test cricket. There have been many batsmen who dominate at league level for their club but when called into the arena of test cricket completely falter. The level of bowling is faster, more accurate, more skilled. The level of expectation is higher. Cricket is a team sport but when you’re out in the middle facing the music being a batsman is lonely.
I’d actually expect that a game between a chess grandmaster and a novice would last longer (as in, more moves) than a game between two grandmasters. In serious chess, it’s customary to concede once you realize that your situation is sufficiently bad that you can’t recover… but if you actually played the game out to its bitter checkmate from there, it might still take quite a while. A skilled player watching the game between the grandmaster and the novice might realize after a very small number of moves that it’s hopeless, but the novice might not realize that, and might also not be familiar with the culture of conceding.
And yes, it’s also possible win after six moves on each side, as glee mentioned. I did something similar, once. Heck, it’s possible to win after two moves each. But even with a wide disparity of skill, that’s far from a typical case.
Glee, what’s your take on this? I would be absolutely shocked if this were true, but I’m very much a layman here.
I agree that top players understand when it’s hopeless and therefore resign rather than suffer.
However this is massively outweighed by e.g. professional opening analysis. There are many examples of Grandmasters playing 20 moves of preparation - then the true battle begins.
Novices would undoubtedly have been checkmated by then.
I’ve given simultaneous displays for over 50 years and most novices are lost by around move 15 (material down or facing a checkmating attack.)
I should explain that I gave that as an example of how easy it is for a master to beat a novice (as I said, I was playing blindfold.)
The swift mate only came about because the novice played a risky opening.
But I was always going to win just using my experience.
I’ve been known to take 30 shots just getting it past that little windmill.
I would also imagine that most chess experts are well aware of certain “instant traps” that novices can blunder into from the very beginning.
Traps like:
My father also played at a Master level. Whenever we played he complained that I lost because I could never develop a decent middle game. I reminded him that when I was a kid and he was teaching me, he always beat me in fewer than ten moves, so I never had a chance to even learn a freaking middle game.
(sorry - missed the more recent chess posts - catching up now)
An earlier poster mentioned chess. An amateur with a little bit of experience COULD beat a grandmaster in one game (as above - a total fluke) - but in a longer series
(100? 1000? games) would not win another game. Of course - in chess (especially online chess) there are different time controls - one of the most popular being “bullet” in which each player has one minute to complete all their moves. In the case - an amateur’s chance of victory might be slightly higher.
While it’s theoretically possible for a novice to beat a grandmaster in chess (a possibility I’ve alluded to myself, in other threads), the odds of it are beyond astronomical. The most likely scenario under which it would happen would be if the grandmaster suddenly fell unconscious for some medical reason, and his time ran out.
Now, what you could have is a person who’s studied the basics of opening theory, but who’s still unskilled enough overall to still qualify as a novice. Such a player might plausibly make it through the first eight or ten moves of the game in decent shape, and then deteriorate only relatively slowly, so as to avoid a quick mate. And then still lose eventually.
I started a thread about NFL kickers a while back, and I think that a small gap in the abilities of the best and a decent amateur is part of the reason kickers are the least valuable member of a team. For any position I can think of in the NFL, there are scenarios where I can see someone from that position being the #1 pick, except for kicker and punter. If Joe Thomad, Deion Sanders, Charles Haley, or Lawrence Taylor are available in an otherwise average draft class, then a lineman or cornerback or linebacker could be the first pick. The reason is because those guys were notably better than even the second and third best players at the position when they were in their primes. With kickers an NFL team could probably get away with playing the back up kicker from
Northwest New Mexico Tech and not have too much of a drop in performance.
No. For several reasons.
First, kickers are at average compensation compared to many other positions. Spotrac (a great place for looking up contract details for several professional sports), lists kickers with an average salary of 1.9 million or so, which compares well to other positions not QB, LT, or Edge rusher. NFL Positional Payrolls | Spotrac Those positions are also the ones that command high draft picks, but it doesn’t mean NFL teams ignore kicking.
A decent kicker is worth a couple of yards on field position versus a replacement kicker, and NFL head coaches will murder kittens in their sleep to get that kind of advantage. I haven’t looked, but since the move to a longer XP, kickers that automatically convert those are much more valuable than those for which it’s been a crap shoot. Kickers that can stretch the field, i.e. have a greater than average chance of converting long field goals, are also very valuable. Maybe not as valuable as the Raiders infamously thought when they drafted Janikowski in the first round, but valuable over an average guy nonetheless.
What kickers usually aren’t, and what I think you mean by your post, is consistent. An O.K. kicker can have a great year, but it often doesn’t guarantee a subsequent great year. And so teams will find that if you don’t have a Gostkowski or a Justin Tucker, it’s not much of a dropoff to dump their kicker when they hit a slump, and just go grab a retread. I.e., giant (for a kicker) multi-year deals may not be smart.
But kicking is of great importance in the NFL. Those that do it, and thrive at the highest level, tend to stay. Albeit with several different teams.
I came in to this thread to nominate distance running as one of the sports with the least disparity between the elite and the average athlete. Unlike gymnastics or baseball or golf, running does not require complex skills that take years to master. Save for probably having a more efficient stride, Des Linden is doing the very same thing that I am, out on the roads; she’s just doing it faster and longer. I’ve run with a professional ultramarathoner with a top-ten finish at Western States; the only noticeable difference was that she wasn’t out of breath at the top of climbs that had the rest of us gasping.
If you’re only 5’3, you’re not going to play in the NBA, outliers like Muggsy Bogues and Spud Webb notwithstanding. And it helps to have a high proportion of fast-twitch muscle fibers if you want to be a sprinter. But the only real difference between an elite marathoner and a weekend hobby jogger is the former’s willingness to endure the hard workouts, to do the anaerobic intervals, to grind out the miles on a long run, to go deep into the pain cave. Excellence in this sport is primarily a matter of will.
Cite? The 2018 Boston Marathon. The men’s race was won by a civil servant in the Japanese postal service, while the runner up in the women’s race was a nurse anesthetist from Arizona who trained in the mornings before work. Granted, that was an unusual year, as the rain and cold temperatures made many elites elect to drop out. But Sarah Sellers, the nurse who finished second, later ran a 2:31:49 at the 2019 Chicago Marathon, which earned her a spot in the 2020 Olympic Marathon Trials. So her Boston result wasn’t a fluke.
An absolutely killer season for a kicker is like an 8 in approximate value. The average AV for the 32 kickers with the most FG attempts last year was like 2.7. Justin Tucker has average 5.1 over his career.
Tom Brady averages 15.55 over his career and the league average for staring QBs was 11.75 last year. Lamar Jackson was 25 last year.
The value over replacement for a great QB (3.8) and a great kicker (2.4) are a lot closer than I though it would be. However a great season for a QB is way way better than an average season and a great season for a kicker is nice, but not changing your season.
Wait, so the people that won the Boston marathon are your average athletes? Sarah Sellers (I had to look this up, I’m not into running) was a 9 time long distance conference champ in college. Not a big school, but comparing her to last year’s championship times she would have finished 7th in division 1. The reason she’s a nurse is probably because top 10 long distance runners don’t get $30M contracts from the Packers, not because she’s not way way way better than average.
No, Sarah Sellers and Yuki Kawauchi (the men’s winner) are not average athletes. Not at all. But my point was that they both made themselves elites by putting in the work, work they were able to do while also holding down full-time jobs. I’m not by any means saying that becoming a top-tier distance runner is easy, or doesn’t require discipline, endurance, and the willingness to suffer; I’m saying that, in my opinion, those are almost the only things that are required. You don’t have to have incredible hand-eye coordination to be a great runner, or be 6’8, or have a 40" vertical jump; you don’t need a set of golf clubs, or a race car, or an ice rink. You just have to have the will to excel. Becoming the next Eliud Kipchoge or Emma Coburn is hard to do, but the path from “average” to “elite” is far more straightforward in running than in just about any other sport I can imagine. Or so it seems to me.
I think this is the only way to get a quantifiable answer. For chess, the best player in the world has an official rating of around 2,800. This means there is a maximum of 14 steps between the best player and the worst (a rating of 0), in terms of the better player beating the worse player ~75% of the time. At the opposite end of the spectrum you have something like tic-tac-toe, where there are maybe 3 similar levels (you know the best strategy all the time; you know the rules but will sometimes lose to best strategy; you don’t know the rules so play randomly). So (duh) chess is harder/has more layers of complexity than tic-tac-toe.
For sports that have both physical and tactical elements (e.g. golf, snooker, darts, croquet - let’s not rehash the debate here about whether these are or are not sports), the physical/skill element will tend to win out over tactics. In other words, it doesn’t matter how good you are at choosing the right shot, you’ll still lose to the person who knows nothing of that but is better at making the shots. As a result, in some ways it becomes harder for the worse player to win, but in other ways it becomes easier (the better player is more likely to have an off-day). Taking soccer as an example, teams in the English Premier League will probably hit the 75% winning mark against teams from two divisions below them (what is currently known as “League One”). This pattern probably continues in a similar fashion all the way down the English football pyramid, which consists of 15-20 levels. This gives about 10 steps between bottom and top, but you could maybe add another couple for playing football against those who don’t compete in an organised league at all. Overall, probably slightly fewer steps than chess. But a lot of that is going to be about physical fitness, as others have said, and the OP seemed to want to exclude that.
Anything that is almost purely physical, like running, is going to have even more layers - take the marathon world record holder, they are going to beat anyone with a marathon PB of (say) 2:15 at least 75% of the time. In turn, that 2:15 PB is going to beat a 2:30 PB a similar amount of time, and so on. People compete in marathons taking anything up to 8 hours to complete them. Does that mean there are more levels to running? I think the comparison sort of breaks down at that point.
Perhaps the only real answer to the OP is that the reason we have professional sports is because of the great disparity between what they can achieve and what an amateur/layman can do. There is no professional World Tic-Tac-Toe Championship because there is no point. Whereas in professional sports, we can be entertained by watching heroes doing what we cannot.
Sorry, but as Chronos has said, this is just false. There are no flukes in chess, all the information is on the board, and the grandmaster is going to be better at dealing with that information, 100% of the time. The amateur cannot even hope to surprise the grandmaster with a novelty, because either the GM will already know about it, or even if not, will know how to defeat it easily.
Archery is not easy , I am learning now. Back in 1997 Geena Davis got interested in archery and trained for a while and tried out for the 2000 US archery olympic team. She came in 24th which is impressive for someone so new to the sport.
Liverpool and Man City win 75% of the time against the rest of the EPL. You don’t even need to leave the top flight, let alone go to League 1.
You’re also positing that the bottom of the pyramid for soccer is equivalent to a 0 ELO in chess? I’m not super familiar with the regional leagues, but I imagine those players generally have approached it in a formal way at some point, equivalent to someone that maybe hung out with their high school chess club but wasn’t great. Probably more like 1000 ELO equivalent.
Yes, fair points - I was basing my initial evaluation on my estimation of how often a ‘cup upset’ would occur, i.e. a team from a lower division beating one from a higher division in an FA Cup match. But what I’d failed to take into account there is the fact that top teams will usually rest their best players for such matches, which will skew the results. So yes, you’re right.
I also agree with you on your second point, though I had accounted for that in my earlier post. I guess 0 for both would be to take a healthy, intelligent adult and teach them the rules for both games, then set them off playing. I’ve actually kind of seen this happen in real life for football (soccer) - I played for a kids’ team from the age of 7 or so, as did a few of my friends. From around age 11 it became common to have a game of football during school lunchbreak. Often, other friends who had previously shown no particular interest in football would join in, and they were still able to compete at a level whereby it was still worth having them on your side rather than not, even if they mostly likely to just get in the way. So there aren’t many levels between me (someone who has played at, and only at, the very bottom rung of the league pyramid) and someone who has had no coaching at all.
Hmm, interesting. I wonder how much of this is down to different sporting cultures. I’m in the US. I played through high school and with a decent club team. Pretty recently a coworker asked me to join his recreational team. There are probably 6 people on the team where it’s just a complete waste to try to involve them in any play. Passing to them results in a loss of possession almost immediately on almost all occasions. The only help is to provide an extra person for the other team to dribble around when on defense. Maybe the baseline for soccer skills in the UK is just way higher.