Remember though that these are on pro golf courses with long, difficult fairways and greens, and lots of hazards. +20 is only an average of a little more than a bogey per hole. An amateur with a week’s training is not going to average a bogey per hole. Given that some holes would be a +10 mess, there would have to be birdies as well. If I were playing, I’d be thrilled to get a bogey on a 400+ yard hole with a fast green. I’d probably average more like +3 or +4 per hole if I was lucky. I’m a bad golfer, but with much more than a week of training.
If you gave 100 amateurs a week’s training and had them play 18 holes on a pro course, I wouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t a single birdie among them. And the average score would like be +30-+50. Double and triple bogeys would be decent scores for a hole.
As mentioned upthread, there is a pro circuit for bags, and I somehow fell down the rabbit hole last year watching several championships. What they do is unreal. If you think you’re a good backyard player, you have no chance against these guys. It’s a totally different game at that level (as is pretty much any sport or game when you get to the elite class.)
And, in many cases, the courses themselves are set up to be even more challenging (difficult pin placement, narrower fairways, longer rough, etc.) during a professional tournament, than they are normally set up when the public is golfing on those courses.
So, if you had amateurs playing on a course set up for a PGA tour event, they would be doing even worse than they would have on the same course when set up for “public play.” Conversely, a top pro player, playing on the course under a normal, non-professional-level setup, will do even better than they would during a tournament.
Duh. Because I had 250 stuck in my mind. Yes, 150 possible, but impossible for a pro to bowl that bad unless physically ill. I had a league bowling average of 172 when I last bowled regularly, I hadn’t bowled a 150 or under for years before that. Bowling is particularly difficult in this challenge because pros have only 1 or 2 frames without strikes.
Here’s the thing about your corrected version @Mesquite-oh, under this definition, you could have someone who is already pro-level quality, just was never discovered or never bothered to compete. So we’re now talking about (potentially) a pro competing vs the absolute top of the field.
Someone who has played something their whole life covers a huge variety. I mean, I’ve played Starcraft (1 and 2) for the whole time it’s in existence, but especially at my age don’t have the twitch and operations per second of any of the real pros. But I’ve seen some of the tops in the Battlnet leaderboards during the heydays, and they’re at least close.
One bad choice in a map unknown to either party in a tourney, and it’s a good chance for an upset, even if the other party was never ‘pro’. But that’s 2 very different ‘played whole life’ scenarios between me and a leaderboard placer (but non e-sport competitor).
Okay, got that out of the way. I actually came to mention an area in which it would honestly (barring heart attack, illness or other non-skill bases area) in which the OP’s scenario would almost never happen (barring my example above).
Professional shooting. In that above and beyond the skills from a lifetime of practice, the pros use equipment that is far beyond the use of many amateurs. The same applies to almost any equipment based sport, such as motorsport and boating, because if you don’t have the budget to have the absolute best, you’re pretty much doomed even WITH equivalent skills.
Even if you assume a tournament where all parties use the same equipment, the pro is going to have the support of a giant team of experts to keep said equipment in top shape, which is outside the realm of an amateur.
Except the head-to-head odds don’t change that much between an amateur and a pro. Even this strategy (which is far from the best IMO) takes you well within the 100:1 limit of odds. Basically it will be 100% to the amateur for all the hands the pro doesn’t think they can win (for the ante alone, of course) then drops to much less than 50:50 for the one hand they think they can, but not that much, certainly much much better than 100:1. The key point is pro does not have a significantly more skill of assessing the plain odds of a particular pair of cards winning (in all possible games) than anyone else (that is just a table that can easily be memorized).
If instead you go with “all in every hand more than 95% chance of winning, 1 in 10 for everything else” it becomes even more close.
Until he has a hand that he thinks will beat you. If he waits until he’s got a royal flush, then you’re going to win by collecting those antes before it comes up. If he takes the bet on anything less, then he just might lose. I’m not sure precisely how picky the pro should be in the optimal strategy, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it gives him less than a 99% chance.
Many folks have said that chess has no luck, but that’s not strictly true. The amount of luck is very small, but not zero. Imagine that you take a player who knows what the legal moves are, but no more, and imagine that he’s playing against Magnus Carlsen. But now imagine that he has a secret communication device (we’ll assume it’s an earbud, rather than any other sort of device), and someone’s feeding the novice moves directly from Alpha Chess. The (cheating) novice would, of course, win.
But now suppose that the novice tries to cheat this way, but on the big day, the earbud malfunctions. He can’t get the moves from the computer, and so he just chooses every move randomly. But there’s still a chance, on every move, that he’ll randomly happen to choose the move the computer would have recommended. And therefore a nonzero (though exceedingly small) chance that he’d make the computer-recommended move every time.
That’s the extreme case, of course. But it could also happen that, in a match between two skilled players, that there is some key juncture point where one move eventually leads to victory, while all others eventually lead to defeat, but the eventual victory or defeat are too far off for the mortal players to see. The player will of course pick the move that he thinks is most likely to be the right one, even if he’s not sure, and he’ll sometimes be right.
Meanwhile, how does this proposed challenge work for team sports? If I pick baseball, for instance, am I replacing one player on a professional team, and then going up against another (full) professional team? Or would it be a team composed entirely of average folks against a team composed entirely of pros? If the latter, then of course it’s hopeless, but I can imagine that a baseball team just might be able to get lucky playing (effectively) with a team of only 8.
I think you should assume the amateur has the team, too. If the only degree of freedom is the skill of the competitor, could an amateur win >= 1% of the time.
But I don’t think I should - the OP only said a weeks worth of training, and that only to bring them up to speed on the technical requirements of the professionals leagues so they didn’t lose on technicalities.
But the additional point is that a great deal of ‘sports’ (since we’ve mentioned e-sports, card games, CCG and the like) has a huge cash requirement that bars a lot of amateur play. And even if you were gifted equivalent gear all of a sudden, a week would not be enough to get good at using gear if what you were used to was your old amateur equipment.
I was about to mention that there are tournament formats for Magic: the Gathering that equalize the monetary aspect: A part of the tournament entry fee goes to buying the cards you’ll be using, and you can only use those cards. But that means that you don’t know in advance what cards you’ll have available, so you can’t just exactly copy someone else’s deck and have to know how to build a good deck yourself, which works against the novice. Though you might still be able to teach the novice enough about deck-building in the week of prep time you have, that they might still stand a decent chance.
Agreed, and I even have experience in house where my wife won a round in a MLP CCG (My Little Pony) tourney with a local expert because they were required to play with a out-of-box sealed starter and a fixed number of boosters.
But now we’re back to the ‘luck’ element that’s been the bane of many of the examples. I think we’ve all acknowledged that a novice with a week’s training can beat an expert if they get the perfect draw and the expert gets bupkis, at least enough for the 1 to 100 the OP expects.
We’re just arguing about which elements and sports are controllable outside of completely random values. Which is still fun, don’t get me wrong, I just wanted to include the equipment/gear variable that hadn’t gotten play yet in the discussion.
I’m not trying to fight the hypothetical as it were.
Well, maybe. I’m a pretty good player and league champ for multiple seasons in a row, and I’ll tell ya, the level of the pros is pretty impressive. IF a top ten player had his worst game, at the same time as a guy like me had his best game, maybe. Those two events may never well overlap.
It could. Take baseball, for example. I’m the old, fat guy the team has to field. So they look at the lineup of the opposing team, count the number of pull hitters, then position me out of the way while they field with two. The gear the pros play with is the same stuff I can buy at Big 5. Make the game at the Single - A level and it would be even easier.
An average person? I doubt that. Even if reasonably fit. Now, if they have a tennis background, sure, maybe a point or two off a male player, and I expect that to be from a double fault or unforced error. David Foster Wallace wrote a pretty interesting essay following around a Top 50 (or so) player – somewhere in the middle-of-the-pack of Top 100, and just how crazy the differences in levels are even between the Top 10 and the tier below. Of course, at that level, sometimes upsets happen. But between an average person with a week of training – which is what this hypothetical involves – even winning a game between a fit male with just a week of training and a championship caliber female strikes me as highly, highly unlikely.
We’re still waiting on the OP’s feedback on whether we should consider team sports, because you’re absolutely correct, a good enough team can carry a poor player. But in that case, we need to know if they whole team is pro, or if it also has to be a ‘best of the amateurs’ while the opposite is top 10 in the world.
And that brings up ANOTHER variable, as in baseball, rampant performance enhancing drug use has been a winked at reality for years, to the detriment of the sport. And it’s not like E-sports have had massive issues with performance enhancing drugs as well. Yet another ‘edge’ some top sports players would have over the best of the amateurs. If an illicit one.
However let’s skip the cheating aspect completely.
So our novice is playing random moves and aiming to hit the best move every time.
In the opening (say the first 6-10 moves by each side), the World Champion will have no trouble playing superbly. After that a typical position will have about 30 possible legal moves.
I would estimate roughly that of those 30:
1 will be the very best
4 will be jolly good
5 would be reasonable
5 would be poor
15 would be blunders
Now you probably need at least 20 moves to build up a winning advantage, which means that for a perfect game your chances are 1 in 30 to the 20th power.
Even playing a succession of jolly good moves gives 1 chance in 6 to the 20th power.
For me, that settles the matter - but I would also point out that the World Champion has far better chances of playing ‘jolly good’ or ‘best’ moves each time (which makes beating them even more difficult.)
Now your idea has given me one - if we can come up with a way of generating a truly random move generator*, we could play some games (I volunteer to be the experienced player ) and see how the game goes…
*My first thought would be to:
roll a d6 to pick which piece to move
see how many legal moves that piece has
select a suitable dice (I knew roleplaying would come in handy!)
roll that dice (ordering the moves in left before right and forward before sideways before backwards.)
OK, I’ve played one game using the above suggestion. White is the ‘random’ player.
I played the first 9 moves for each side using popular moves from an opening database.
Moves 10 and 11 by White were controlled by dice - and here is the game:
If you read a lot of bridge books you will see that “luck” pops up quite regularly. Usually where there are a choice of two finesses to make a contract and the wrong one taken. Top ranked players are at an advantage here though, they will have counted every discard and watched every signal and make a decision based on this.
I’m aware, but for an amateur (even with a week’s training) it’s likely to be the best strategy and is based on the post I was replying to, which was suggesting the amateur might fluke 12 strikes. They are far more likely to do that by bowling straight than by attempting a hook shot.
I reckon I’m pretty much the average person when it comes to bowling, I’ve probably averaged playing about 1 frame a year for the last 20 years and typically score less than 100. With a week’s training, I would probably be able to score 150 at least once in 100 frames. So it does deserve consideration as an answer to the OP. I think it’s worth bearing in mind that a week’s training for most sports isn’t that many hours, due to fatigue. After 2 frames of bowling, my arm is pretty tired, due to the muscles not being used to it. If I were to train for a week, I doubt I would manage more than 2 sessions of 2 hours a day, for a total of 28 hours. That’s definitely going to help me improve, but I don’t think it’s enough time to develop a reliable hook shot, even with coaching from a pro.
Chess, as already stated, not a chance. A top 10 player could probably play 100 amateurs simultaneously and not lose a game (there may be a few draws).
Poker, as already stated, sure - in fact it’s not that uncommon for an amateur to beat pros, probably the most famous being Chris Moneymaker winning the World Series of Poker main event in 2003. But although he was an amateur, he had a lot more than a week’s worth of training.
This is also a fair answer to your question, but I wouldn’t call it a sport. Also, just from that description I would bet you are more skilled than the average person at basketball. A significant proportion of the population wouldn’t have the arm strength to hit the hoop/backboard from the 3-point line, let alone score a basket.
Hmm, maybe (top grandmasters have missed mate in one due to fatigue, Kramnik being the classic case) - but that was against top opposition. I think they would have to literally fall asleep to fall victim to this against an amateur. Most of the time the amateur won’t even get the opportunity to set this up.
Sure, but it took you more than a week of practice to get to that standard.
Covered in post #19 - I stand by what I said, over 2 sets I would lose 6-0, 6-0 but I reckon I would get my racquet to one of her serves a few times during that, and one time it might just ping a winner past her.
The usual term in English is a ‘pack’ of reds; ‘splitting the pack’. Also commonly used is ‘bunch’.
There is very little luck involved. I’ve played a fair amount of snooker (way more than a week’s worth) and my highest ever break in that time was 24. Most of the time, I miss, and the pro is going to score 50+ points. This will happen every time, 100 times (you generally need to score a total of 50-70 points to win a frame of snooker).
Agreed, but you are WAY better than the average person at bowling, and it took you far longer than a week of practice to reach that level.
Still don’t think it works - this is exactly why, in distance running, the competitors are keeping a close eye on each other all the time. If you sprint off at the start, the pro might stay with you (very easily indeed, I might add - top marathon pace is a fast sprint for most people), or they might just let you go, and catch up at their leisure. If you stop and walk, they will too. They’re not going to waste energy going all-out. They don’t do that in proper races, unless they are going for the world record.
How does the poker pro know when “he has a hand that will beat you”? The pro can’t wait for AA, the odds are that they will have lost before then (assuming a typical size of blind). What about KK? The odds of KK beating 72o, pre-flop, are about 4:1 are they not? So clearly, the amateur is going to win in comfortably more than 1 in 100 of these situations. I’m not saying it gives the amateur an advantage, or that it’s a good idea - just that the quicker they can get all their money in, the less their lack of skill shows up. In limit games, they are substantially never going to win a big pot against the pro, and will probably lose a succession of small pots. Nevertheless, they will win more than 1 in 100 heads-up matches even in a limit game, thanks to luck of the draw.
It’s not too rare for top soccer teams to beat opponents at the same level despite having a player sent off, so if you instead assume replacing the ejected player with the amateur, sure it will happen more than 1 in 100 times (the amateur will sometimes get in the way in a negative way, but most of the time won’t be able to keep up with the play anyway).
) and see how the game goes…