There are no 0 ELO players and there’s nothing special about 0 on the ELO scale. I believe 800 is the minimum ELO score you’re given as a newly competitive chess player.
ELO doesn’t have any inherent zero point (you could shift the whole scale up or down by any constant, and it would still work the same way), but it would still make sense to set the scale such that a 0 is someone who just barely knows how to move the pieces, since that’s a mark of the minimum possible level of skill. And ELO scores aren’t routinely calculated for people that low (anyone who cares enough to enter a context where it would be calculated is well above that level), but surely there have been extrapolations of what such a newbie’s ELO would be.
No, I’d say we’re talking about exactly the same level of player, just describing them in different ways (and from different vantage points - if you played for a decent club team, you’re already a couple of levels above me). I’m saying that I myself am only 1 or 2 levels above such a player.
I realise that and didn’t intend to imply otherwise, I was simply positing 0 as a theoretical minimum Elo rating for the purpose of this thread.
Trivial footnote: the Elo rating system was invented by Arpad Elo and thus it’s not necessary to make all the letters capital - even though it looks like its an acronym, it’s not.
I don’t doubt that I wouldn’t be able to manage a single lap but that article does say:-
Correct. It’s probably the only Olympic sport you could do while you were dead.
Your first problem is finding games where an amateur actually plays a grandmaster. Grandmasters earn their money in top-class tournaments, where only strong players are allowed to enter (or get invited.)
You are welcome to search chess databases for the biggest difference in rating when a grandmaster loses. (Then again, you have to decide whether an amateur would even have a chess rating.)
I’ve played national championships and international chess tournaments for over 35 years (my rating was between 2250 and 2390 
.) I estimate I’ve played over 50 grandmasters - and never won a single game. :o
And even at my standard, I would be completely confident of never losing to an amateur. 
As Chronos and Dead Cat have already remarked, there are no flukes in chess.
Bullet chess is a bit risky :rolleyes:- why even a sneezing fit could make you run out of time. 
However it is astonishing to see how fast Grandmasters can play with their experience and knowledge of patterns.
Honestly, that doesn’t count as beating the poor fellow!
I think you underestimate how much opening theory there is.
I remember preparing to play a grandmaster and discovering that he played four major openings :eek: (all to a deep level.)
To understand (NOT learn by heart) just one opening to a depth of 8-10 moves is pretty hard.
Understanding several is way beyond what any novice could be expected to do.
Also I’ve played many grandmasters and believe me your position can deteriorate pretty quickly…
My one game v Gary Kasparov started pretty well. After 12 moves each, I had a position I’d played before (and felt confident about how to play the middle-game.)
9 moves later, we actually repeated the position twice (so clearly I was still in with a chance.)
15 moves later he had a winning attack.
Now you may not consider this a ‘rapid deterioration’. But bear in mind that a) I was rated 2375 at the time (way above a novice) and b) it was a simultaneous display! :smack:
As Shalmanese points out, comparing ELO ratings is a good way to proceed. Taking a 300-point ELO differential as the unit, the best human Go player is very likely (but not quite certain) to beat an amateur 7 dan; who has the same advantage over an amateur 4 dan; similarly over 1 dan; over 3 kyu; over 6 kyu; over 9 kyu; over 12 kyu; over 15 kyu. Most novices will be 15 kyu or worse — So figure 8+ levels between a novice and the world champion.
The same exercise in Chess (with 300-pt ELO spreads) would yield something like,
World Champion; Grandmaster; Candidate Master; A; B-; D; Novice — just 6 levels. But it may be hard to compare Chess (many games are drawn) and Go (no draws).
In Chess, when the lovely Master Anna Rudolf defeated a Grandmaster (and some other top players) to become International Master at Vandoeuvre in 2007, this was such a surprise that she was (falsely!) accused of hiding a computer in her lip stick! :eek:
Sigh. Do we really have to go over this again? Anna Rudolf’s appearance is completely unrelated to her chess ability.
And there are flukes in chess, or it’d never be possible for any weaker player to ever beat any stronger player. Upsets do happen. There just aren’t any flukes big enough to allow a novice to beat a grandmaster.
Thanks for the plug. I agree with just about everything you said in principle, but I think quad bogey is a little high. Anybody who can get the ball up at all, and plays within his abilities (e.g., not trying to cut off doglegs, or make long shots over water), should be able to shoot around 125 on an average course, which is about a triple bogey per hole. If there were no forced carries, he wouldn’t even need to get the ball up to do that.
An average guy who gets good instruction and puts in quality practice time should be able to break 100, which is less than double bogey per hole. What’s great about golf is that even someone at that level can occasionally hit a shot that a pro would envy. If you watched the Tiger-Phil-Brady-Manning match today, you saw Tom Brady, by far the worst golfer of the four, hit the best shot of the day, holing out from over 100 yards.
On the other end of the scale, I agree with men’s gymnastics. Maybe people can do a cartwheel, but I doubt one person in a thousand could do anything on the rings or horse that would get them a tenth of a point from an Olympic judge. It is way, way harder than they make it look.
I agree, but I was more commenting on the average golfer’s score skyrocketing if they had to play like a pro, with strict adherence to every rule of golf. So, no picking up and calling it good, no dropping near the line and adding a stroke instead of having to walk all the way back to the tee if you get to your ball and find it’s OB, actually having to line up a fourth putt if they had to: all of the things most recreational golfers do in order to speed the game up.
Those shots where you hit it perfectly are a pretty good feeling. And nearly everyone gets at least one in a round. Similar reinforcement as how a slot machine works.
Totally agree on gymnastics. A newbie is going to get themselves hurt on a vault horse. Shoot, just swinging on something like a high bar hurts my hands. I know they’ve got that glove with a dowel in it, but still, I’d think their hand calluses must be something to behold.
For a sport with very high disparity, I’ll nominate mine: sailplane racing. (A racing sailplane looks like this.)
This is typically arranged as a race (scored on achieved speed) around a course that might be 150 km on a dodgy weather day, and 500+ km on a really good day, with winning speeds typically in the range of 80 to 140 kph.
Even among glider pilots, those who could hope to even occasionally complete such tasks are unusual. An average layman could not realistically hope to get the glider into the air and back on the ground safely - and would frequently not survive the attempt.
That has to be quite an experience - playing well against one of the greatest ever. (But I think you have misspelled his first name.)
Are both of you implying luge has the least disparity? I beg to disagree. Olympic luge racing may look deceptively simple but it sure ain’t your daddy’s snow sledding. If you put a reasonably fit average person at the top of an Olympic track, they might be able to make it to the finish line with very conservative sliding lines and lots of braking (although my bet is on crashing and suffering bodily harm in some form) but their time would be a mile off competitive standards. Heck, even national team level lugers sometimes lose five seconds over a 40 second run by making a single mistake in the wrong place and losing much of their speed. As for being dead, that is a distinct possibility every time you are moving at 80mph with little protective gear other than a helmet, while barely glancing at what awaits ahead.
I would not give the average person one chance in ten thousand of actually luging to the finish line on an Olympic track. The only way they’re getting down without crashing is if they don’t actually attempt to slide down properly but keep their feet on the track or something.
That’s more or less how I was imagining it, yes. That said, some tracks are regularly hosting various exhibition events like wok racing or shovel racing for amateurs who want to try sliding in a relatively safe manner.
Interesting discussion. A few comments:
One thing that’s interesting about Chess is that while in a realistic sense a grandmaster will never lose to a novice, that never comes with an asterisk, because there’s a calculatable non-zero chance that the novice will, turn after turn, just randomly make the best possible move. I’m pretty sure that if you did the math, the odds of a novice beating a grandmaster would end up being less than one in the number of atoms in the universe, or something like that, but it’s definitely not mathematically zero. (Presumably the same sort of math applies to Go).
The only high level competitive event I can think of where a real novice has a genuinely non-trivial chance of beating a master is poker, because of the element of luck. A rec room player might just get it all in aces versus kings on hand 1, or for that matter, kings vs aces and spike a king.
On the flip side, how do you possibly script it so that a team of novices beats a team of professionals at, say, NFL football? As suggested upthread, you have to go to something truly insane such as multiple simultaneous fluke injuries, which doesn’t really seem like it’s in the spirit of the question. But how do we compare “none of us can imagine how it can happen” with “can be calclulated to be less than the number of atoms in the universe”?
There’s also a distinction between football and some other sports like baseball and basketball, where an extremely large skill gap could be imaginably overcome by just closing your eyes and getting lucky. That is, a rec league basketball player is probably physically capable of throwing the ball the length of the court towards the basket. But it will only go in one time in 200. But that could happen 100 times in a row. In baseball, similarly, a rec league player can at least go through the motions necessary to hit a MLB fastball. They’d just have to be insanely lucky to do so. But that luck is at least possible in a sense that seems, to me, to be missing from sports like NFL football in which a rec league player (a) probably can’t physically throw a full field hail mary, and (b) luck alone won’t result in that being caught, as receivers are actively trying to intercept it.
A couple of related-sounding questions:
(1) What sports could work OK if both teams featured a super wide range of abilities… but they matched between the teams. Ie, teams of 8 featuring 2 world champs, 2 minor leaguers, 2 college players, and 2 rec league players. (Ultimate Frisbee with man-to-man coverage, for instance, would probably work pretty well.)
(2) What sports, when competed at a rec league level, most resemble that same sport when played at a world class level… just somewhat worse. Ie, the same basic things happen in similar proportions, just all done much much better at the high level.
I have long wanted to slide a curling stone down a bobsled track, just to see what would happen.
I suspect that a lot of sports could be played with mixed teams like you describe… except that, in practice, most of them would be one-on-one (or two-on-two, or however many pros you have) with some spectators having better-than-ringside seats. For sports with positions, it might depend on which position the pro is in: If you construct baseball teams that way, with a pro as pitcher on each side, then the game is going to go into extra innings at 0-0 until one of the pro pitchers manages to get a fluke hit off (and none of the non-pros are ever going to get that hit off). On the other hand, if your pro on each team is the center fielder, then he’s guaranteed to make any play in center field (which won’t be that many, since the Little Leaguers won’t even be hitting that far), and whenever he comes up to bat is likely to be a hit or better, but the rest of the game will be mostly unaffected, and the outcome will be decided by which amateurs are better at getting on base.
If the teams are smart, they’ll intentionally walk the pro every time.