Has anyone ever done an analysis of card and board games to determine more-or-less how much skill and luck is involved in each?
For example, chess would be a game of 100% skill. A grandmaster should beat a novice 100% of the time.
Now with cribbage, I’ve read that an expert should win about 58% of the time with decent competition. My record against my computer is around 65%, but it’s not the strongest cribbage game in the world. This would make me say that cribbage is about two-thirds luck and one-third skill.
Bridge would be a game that I would call mostly skill. Where would gin fit in? Backgammon? Poker? Hearts? Are there any hard numbers on this anywhere?
In the short term, luck rules. Anyone can win against anyone else over the coarse of an hour or so. In the long run, it’s all skill. Over the coarse of maybe 20 total hours (not necessarily all at once) the great player will have all of the money.
Monopoly- mainly luck, it feels. I lose sometimes and I win when I play. It depends where you land, if you get all of one color, and if the other player(s) will trade. Plus if you land on other people’s. I guess there is some skill in deciding what to buy, but really the trick is to buy up whenever you can.
Scrabble- mainly skill. You have to be lucky in the letters you get, but you have to know where to put them, how to get the double and triple letter scores, that sort of thing.
Battleship- mainly luck. There is a strategy, I know, if you go in completely diagonal lines…but mostly its just sort of hunt around and hope to land.
With poker, I’ll absolutely agree with hajario: If you play one game, it’s mainly luck. But if you play for hours and hours and you always lose, it’s up to you.
That’s the case for most cardgames; of course it’s difficult to win if fate has bestowed upon you miserable cards, but on the long run everyone will get all in all equally good decks, so then it’s skill.
For Monopoly, I’d say it’s mainly luck, providing that you follow some basic strategy rules (the best of which is: BUY EVERYTHING YOU CAN GET and don’t care about the price; when the game is approaching the end, it’s mot the cash that counts, it’s the estate).
For chess, E. A. Poe writes about that in the beginning of The Murders in the Rue Morgue that it’s rather luck than skill. Of course you can plan in advance, which theoretically keeps out luck, but the unimaginable number of possible moves is so great you easily forget something, and if you do, it was bad luck (or good luck for your opponent), and that can decide the game (if the skill difference between the players is not too great). Poe prefers checkers, where you can also plan in advance, but the danger of overseeing something is much smaller. Something similar applies to go, a Japanese game which probably comes closest to the demand for a 100% skill, 0% luck game, but there, of course, the player that begins is in advantage. Another game that contains an interesting amount of skill is Diplomacy, where your tactical abilities as a negotiator are called.
100% luck games are the already mentioned children’s game “war” and roulette.
The question for a perfect game is a fascinating one, and I recommend Hermann Hesse’s novel Glasperlenspiel about it.
Of course, I will agree with the “100% skill” assessment. Anybody not familiar with go should look into it - the rules are elegantly simple, but it is AT LEAST as strategically demanding as chess, many would say more so. A brief blurb:
Concerning the advantage of going first: in tournament play, 4 1/2 or 5 1/2 points are often deducted from the score of black to nullify black’s advantage in going first, and to prevent ties.
You can get a basic idea of the game from the free 9x9 version of the “Many Faces of Go” program:
Other games - I think assigning a “percentage skill to percentage luck” figure to games involving an element of chance is difficult, as even a rank amateur who has just been told the rules will be utilizing some sort of strategy, and recognize some advantageous plays available to them.
I think in most games with any appreciable skill component, if you set up an opponent that relied purely on luck and had no knowledge whatsoever - say a program which simply chose a legal move at random on every turn, that opponent would get soundly thrashed by a moderately proficient player almost every time.
One game which supposedly owes its popularity to a nice mix of skill and luck is backgammon - a skillfull player will usually win, but it is possible for a novice to get lucky and beat the expert.
There is no game where luck plays no part. Consider chess: In any situation, there’s some better moves, and some worse moves, and there’s some particular move that Gary Kasparov would make if he were in that situation and had as much time as he wanted to make it. It’s conceivable that a newbie who doesn’t know anything more than how the pieces move might, at every move, make the same move that Kasparov would have made, and therefore play as well as Kasparov, thorough pure luck. Admittedly, that’s highly unlikely… but it is possible that a half-decent player might be in a particularly crucial position at some point in a game, and can’t decide which of two good options is better. He might guess there, and might guess right.
Battleship, on the other hand, is not even close to pure luck. The difference is that the skill is mostly psychological: You’re trying to put your ships in places where your opponent is unlikely to guess, and at the same time, figure out where your opponent would have put his ships, to do the same thing to you. The same can also be said of paper-rock-scissors: A skilled player can consistently beat a novice, in the long run, by figuring out the pattern in his opponent’s moves.
This goes into the field of game theory. I think the best strategy for battleship and paper-rock-scissors are to provide an absolute inpredictability for all of your moves. You can do that by doing every decision (where to put your ships, what symbol to choose) random. Then it’s pure luck.
That’s the same for a soccer player doing a series of penalties: If the goalkeeper has discovered a pattern in your decision about left or right corner, he can predict your next move with a certain probability > 50 %. Mathemeticians and game theorists have proved that no strategy in games like this will provide you better long-term results that pure random decisions.
putting a little more skill into battleship. I would sometimes play 2 ships in a T configeration. the idea is to have them hit the ship on the vertical section of the T (or the top section where the vertical section intersects it). They will hopefully sink the vertical ship (either a 3 or 4 ship) along with the single hit on the top ship (usually a 3 ship). I would tell them what ship they sunk and they wouldn’t realize that they have an extra hit.
But now that you all know that, I’m not going to play B-Ship with any of you.
Well you’re mathematically right about a newbie possibly making a good move every time. But I don’t beleive it’s significant.
What follows is very very crude (mathematically, not the other!).
Usually there are about 30 possible moves (much less if your opponent just checked you). (I would estimate that top players analyse approximately 4 of these, sometimes less.) Of those 30, perhaps 2 are very good, 3 are good, 5 are OK and the rest are bad.
Depending on the type of position, these numbers can all shrink, except for the bad ones.
So I seriously doubt that random choice can keep up with a good player. Even after just 10 moves, if only 1 in 3 choices are worthwhile, you’d have to hit a 1 in 3**10 to have a reasonable game. Aren’t you more likely to win the lottery, or get hit by a meteorite?
In case this all sounds vague (which it is) I can offer the comment that my international rating is 2315 and I’ve also played Kasparov in a clock simul with several other highly rated players. He won 8-0, without trying too hard.
I propose a test to find better numbers than mine above.
I’ll start a thread, giving my assessment of all possible moves of a game. You chaps* pick a move. I’ll reply, then offer the same description, and so on. We get a game, and are the first to ever study just how many mistakes there are.
*chaps covers both male and female
I believe that “luck”, in the millieu of board/card games is intended to mean “random chance”, rather than “bad opposition”. That is, the fact that an opponent makes a poor decision is not totally in the control of the player, but it isn’t “good luck” when it happens, either; the opponent is simply demonstrating lack of “skill”. But when the dice manage to come up double-6 more often than normal, that is “luck”.
Based on that definition, chess’ only luck comes from drawing lots to determine who takes the white pieces, and in a tournament even that is done systematically, rather than by lot.
Bridge, obviously, is a combination of luck and skill, unless one is playing duplicate bridge, where it becomes luck only in the question of which opponents you have for what hands.
Most games are a combination of luck and skill. I like games that reduce the luck factor; for this reason Diplomacy was one of my favorite games. But games of random chance are also fun simply because you get excited as you try to beat the odds; Yahtzee is an example where there is minimal skill, loads of luck, and tons of fun.
Believe it or not, R-P-S is a very subtle game. It’s true that either player can convert it into something totally random, but in a “round robin,” such play will end you up in the middle. There’s a computer program known as “iocaine powder” that’s a fantastically devious R-P-S player. There’s also one known as “roshambot” written by Perry “Only on Tuesdays” Friedman that can be played via web.
Nothing is ever 100% luck or 100% skill. That much I’m 100% sure of.
Take chess, for instance. We can get off into probabilities that random moves will beat a given player on a given day when the sun aligns with Venus and the Oort cloud. But more realistically, there is a significant part of chess that deals with the psychology of the game.
You can subtly concentrate on one part of the board knowing that’s not where your attack will be and hope it distracts your opponent enough to spend time analyzing what you’re looking at.
Maybe your opponent accidently hits his king. Oops, now he has to move it.
What if your opponent doesn’t hit his clock for five minutes after making the move? Bully for you, that just increased your chances of winning.
You can chalk those up to “lack of skill on the part of the opponent,” but it’s also luck that you happened to draw that particular opponent for yourself.
Same as bridge. Duplicate bridge is as close to an all skilled game of cards as you can get. But it still has few luck factors involved. You may be the best team in the tournament, but you happened to run into team Schmoe who didn’t realize that with 38 points they should be in slam and only bid game. Lo and behold, game is the only thing that makes and they get top board for bidding it.
The problem with game theory is that it presumes that your opponent is using the optimum strategy. In a game-theoretical view of paper rock scissors, random moves are optimum, and if one player is playing truly random (and unbiased) moves, then it doesn’t matter one whit what the other player does. The catch, though, is that human beings are lousy at trying to produce random sequences. If a human tries to generate a random trinary sequence, it’s usually possible to predict the next digit with higher than 1/3 accuracy. If you can do this, you can do better than random chance against a human opponent.
Now, if I’m deciding my moves based on some non-random algorithm, it’s theoretically possible for my opponent to figure out what that algorithm is, and therefore beat me every time. This is why it’s not good from a game theory point of view. However, if I can make that algorithm complicated enough, then my (human) opponent won’t figure it out, so I’ll win despite what game theory says.
Y’know, Ender, I was going to bring that up about war, too, but I didn’t want to sound like a wise guy. My big sister once played a game against me where we had 25 war results in a row, with her winning the last one. I actually believed her that it was coincidence, too.
