I agree, I was responding more to the OP’s expansion of the question to include talented amateurs who were already familiar with the game.
Not the word you were googling for but fishing tournaments would seem to be an answer.
I agree that finesses crop up a lot.
However I would not call dealing with these ‘luck’ - there are % choices.
As you say, the top players watch every discard, note every signal (and they also use the bidding, counting the hands and even what leads defenders choose.)
I teach bridge at a club level and my method is to first teach finessing in this order:
- the simple finesse (e.g. xx opposite AQ)
- the repeated finesse (e.g. xxx opposite KJx)
- the two-way finesse (e.g. ATx opposite KJx)
- the ruffing finesse (e.g. x opposite AQJT)
then when not to finesse (e.g. Qxx opposite Axx)
finally how to avoid finessing, using dropping the honour; elimination + throw-in; squeeze play
There’s no way a novice could match a top player in gathering information and knowing the techniques to use it.
This was an episode of Cheers. Sam was playing Robin (the multi-millionaire) a game of chess for a with the stakes being the loser pays the winner a week’s salary. Norm feeding the moves to Sam from the back room from some chess program. The earbud malfunctioned, but then Sam accidently made a brilliant move and won. (Robin cheated him anyway - he paid himself $100 a year as a “salary” as Chairman of the board of his corporation, so Sam got $1 after taxes.)
These types of tournaments are more skill-testing than the other kind.
But, having taught several people to play limited Magic, I’m fairly confident that the average person who had never seen a Magic card could easily learn enough to have a ~30% chance against a pro with a week of training. Which is way more than needed.
Since we were talking about racing and you made the point about having a team to fine-tune the vehicle, I’m not quite sure where you want to draw the line.
Like, should I enter an F1 race with my Camry? With a “stock” F1 car (I think there isn’t really such a thing)? Or with a car and team equivalent to a professional, with only the driver changed. The two extremes (personal car, or everything possible) seem like sensible places to draw the line (with potentially very different outcomes. But it sounded to me like you were arguing for somewhere in the middle: you get the gear, but not the other people with the expertise to make it really hum. Or maybe I misunderstood. Like, obviously, I can’t afford the pro team, but I can’t afford the car either.
In this specific case, I’m not sure it matters. I bet that given a week to train and all the equipment and race support possible, I’d have a better chance of killing myself than of beating a professional driver.
How come no one has mentioned Chris Moneymaker, the Tennessee accountant who won 2.5 million dollars and the Main Event at the World Series of Poker in 2003 against 863 of the best players in the world?
Allegedly, he played poker once a week with his friends and occasionally played online poker. He qualified for the tournament as a prize for winning a $86 to play online tournament. The World Series of Poker was his first real life tournament.
Though in all those cases, it doesn’t get close to 100:1 odds. I’m not sure an average schmuck could be trained to get a F1 car around a single lap safely in a week.
More interesting would be you in your Camry against Lewis Hamilton in an identical Camry. Though that is still worse than 100:1 odds IMO (the only doubt would be he could blow a tire or head gasket)
Sometimes I wonder if I’m on everyone’s ignore list 
. In fairness, it was in the middle of a very long multiquote.
Lewis Hamilton would beat me every time easily with a Camry if I drove a Porsche 911.
I don’t think that’s true if you were given a week with a pro racing driver to learn how to drive the track in the Porsche. Its speed on the straights vs the Camry would more than make up for any skill differential in the corners.
Yeah, I see that, but it depends on the track. I bet Hamilton could beat many people with an underperforming car on a track like the legendary Nürburgring Nordschleife, where top speed isn’t everything.
Not to mention that even if he could it would mean ragging the Camry to within an inch of its life, so would drastically increase the chances of it breaking.
There is a story about one of the Maclaren execs realizing he was about to miss his flight, when Aryton Senna volunteers to take him to the airport in the exec’s Lotus. He got him to the airport in time, but the Lotus was absolutely trashed (he did things like not using the clutch to save time, and just manually judging when the engine was going about the right speed to change gear)
Basically, I was making the case that there are so many other factors above and beyond the amateur’s skill in securing the 1 in 100 win in equipment based sports that it was approaching zero probability outside of the ‘opposite party has heart attack or other internal failure’. I kept adding additional possibilities to make said point, such as ‘giving’ them an equivalent vehicle, but not the crew, to show how many of those unspoken factors applied. I’m not actually shooting for the middle, but pointing out the number of oversites in the OP’s scenario specifically as applied to sports in which gear is a huge matter.
That’s why I also made the point about CCG games in prior posts, in that outside of specifically limited tourneys, there is a substantial cost bar to best performance, however one that could likely be managed by your average amateur (hundreds or thousands of dollars depending on how competitive you want to be, as opposed to the millions/hundreds of millions in F1 per your example).
And that again, using F1 but also most motorsports that meet the sub $1000 prize in the OP, it’s effectively a ‘team’ sport again, which the OP has not weighed in on. Sure, the driver is key (arguably most key) point of failure on a teams final ranking, but the whole team is absolutely needed to even reach the starting line much less a top finish.
Note - I’m not saying the OP is silly, just that a lot of factors were left out of the original, and even adding in the later statement that they were talking about the ‘best of the non-professionals’ rather than the average joe, we still have a lot of wiggle room.
Which makes it the best sort of OP, IMO. Lots of room to rules-lawyer and such, which is really our strength around here.
Poker is largely skill, but there is luck too*.
That’s why WSOP Main Event is won by different players each year.
*A top player might make the final call with a decent % advantage on every hand - but still lose to a lucky novice.
I agree! That’s why I’ve had fun introducing gear/equipment, servicing of said equipment, and I even got to add performance enhancing drugs in favor of the top 10! To infinity and beyond!
And when you are going head to head (and the amateur is always going all in, or folding, based on what’s in their hand) then the luck part increases massively.
At that point its down to judging what the chances of any particular hand winning (compared to all the other possible hands). A pro is not significantly better than an amateur at judging that, its just a table you can memorize in a week easily.
On the TV show Top Gear, the professional driver Sabine Schmitz drove a Ford Transit van round the Nurburgring in 10 minutes 8 seconds. (The van was street legal but had just been stripped of surplus weight. It had 136 hp!)
For comparison, a Porsche Boxter S (280 hp) took 8 minutes 32 seconds!
Sabine Schmitz’s Nurburgring Van CHALLENGE | Top Gear - Part 2 - YouTube
I was going to add that if you want to see every possible variant of “aging out-of-shape motor journalist in performance vehicle X versus professional driver in regular vehicle Y” then Top Gear is the place to go
The point being that Jeremy Clarkson was really pleased to do a lap in 9:59 in a Jaguar S-Type diesel, which prompted Schmitz to say she could match that in a Transit - which she very nearly did, despite a huge power to weight ratio and handling disadvantage. Another close race would be Schmitz in the Jag vs Clarkson in the Boxster, I reckon their lap times would be pretty close.