When I lived in England I regularly played footy with a friend. Occasionally his other close friend, someone I didn’t get on with at all (he was spoilt, self-centred, arrogant) joined us. A couple of times, when I’ve beaten him at a game or outplayed him he uses the excuse that because I am inferior, I am unpredictable and so hard to play against.
He and my friend were both very good players and were in teams. I was never in a team and only developed skill by playing against the friend, so I am the first to agree that I am inferior.
So, does being inferior make a person more difficult to play against due to unpredictability? Or is this utter horseshit?
Eh, everybody has good and bad days, no matter what their skill level. Of course, the skilled person’s bad day is likely to be better than the unskilled’s good day, but everybody is unpredictable to some extent. Unpredictability of performance is just part of playing any game against any opponent, and so you should always be prepared for someone to do unexpectedly better or worse than usual.
I think what he really means is that he expects to be able to phone it in, so to speak, and only brings his half-assed game when you play because that’s usually enough to win it. When you’re having an unusually good day, his half-assed game isn’t enough and he’s not prepared to crank it up, so he loses. And instead of saying, “Yeah, I was slacking and got my ass kicked,” he tries to make it your fault for being unpredictable. :rolleyes:
I play a bit of tennis. I find it significantly easier to play an experienced opponent than a weaker player. I’d still beat the weaker player, but my standard of play would be quite poor. The reason is that it’s easier to hit a medium or fast-paced return accurately than it is to apply power to a slower, wobbly shot that floats over the net.
Even if I’d lose to a better player than me, I’d probably make less unforced errors than I would against a poorer player.
I don’t play football, so I can’t see how this might apply to that game.
To some extent, yes, I believe this is a valid argument. Sometimes when I play ultimate (frisbee), you end up marking an inexperienced player and they may just make the craziest unpredictable throw which any experienced player would never make. Sure, it’s not a good throw - but if it actually works it can be frustrating. However, it would be wrong to say that it is more difficult to play against the inexperienced player. It is just more frustrating - ie when these really bad throws actually beat you.
I can see it being true when playing defensively, maybe, but if you take the offensive he’s forced to react to you, so his supposed unpredictability doesn’t really come into play.
It definitely can, yeah. This may be where beginner’s luck comes from. A novice will sometimes do things that a more experienced player would never do. So if you’re playing a novice, you might be surprised because they do things that you’re not supposed to because they are poor strategy or something.
In fencing, I consider going up against new sword wielders as quite a challenge. They are very unpredictable. More experienced fencers know when to fall back, when to advance. Less experienced fencers are more likely to make an off balanced lunge. They hit harder because they haven’t figured out their range yet. They’re more difficult to fake out because they don’t know what to react to.
This is definitely a valid argument. I never played American Football and am incredibly unathletic but me and one other average sporting guy beat a Princeton Quarterback and another average sport. I just basically thought to myself, “How can I make it hard for these guys to catch me?” Obvious yes, but I think the neophyte’s mind approaches it differently. We utterly annihilated them and I was the one coming up with the plays.
“The best fencer in the world doesn’t have to fear the second best fencer, or the third. He has to fear the rank amateur who doesn’t do what’s expected.”
However, I think in the long run, experience should be able to overcome the less experienced athlete. The amateur may still win a few from time to time, but it’s a pretty poor excuse – if you lost to him, it’s because he outplayed out and you weren’t good enough to overcome him.
The fencing thing applies to martial arts, as well. White belts do some crazy things sometimes and are less likely to comply with techniques to make their partner look good.
I think it’s a load of crap and your friend is making excuses. Real life sports aren’t like video games where you can just mash buttons and wind up doing some complicated maneuver.
A friend of mine is really good at basketball, I dont really play that often. I’ve NEVER beaten him. In four years. He’s just flat out better than me.
Same with another friend of mine and soccer. I’ve never played soccer, I don’t watch soccer, I don’t know any strategies or anything. I’ve never come close to beating him.
If I went up against Kasparov in chess, he’d annihilate me.
Sometimes you just have luck on your side. I played a game of pickup three on three basketball in the gym and went 7 for 7 a couple days ago. No skill, nothing to do with unpredictability, I just happened to make everything I tossed up. Just luck, nothing more.
Last year I taught my niece how to play. I figured could take her milk money without working up a sweat. Thing is, I could never tell when she was bluffing because she would raise everything. And she drew some monster hands. “Uncle tdn, I only have two fours. Oh, and three of the ones with A’s on them. Is that good?”
She’s now having a gold-plated swingset built, courtesy of my paychecks.
Yeah, I was going to say exactly this. When sparring in striking or grappling, a lot of times I dread going against a novice, because they’re more likely to lose control and injure you unexpectedly. An advanced black belt may beat you, but they won’t hurt you when they do it.
I used to do kendo (basically “Japanese fencing”) and after I became more experienced at it, I saw the wisdom in this concept as well. However, I expect most practicioners of kendo, and perhaps most fencers, see it in a slightly different way than “the amateur will beat the expert” - perhaps instead as “the amateur will beat up the expert.”
You’re using a practice “sword” made out of 4 strips of bound-together bamboo to beat the hell out of people, and even against experienced people you’d get bruised. We wore cloth and leather armor (but a metal face-mask), and there were three allowed targets - top of the head, forearms, chest. (A target that we learned about but weren’t supposed to attack was a thrust to the throat - protected by a guard but a sword could get under it still.) You also had to call out your target (in Japanese) while you were making the hit, and it had to be a solid hit to count.
The two worst incidents I saw were caused by serious newbies against knowledgeable (but non-expert) people. One was a hit to the throat; the practice sword’s tip slipped under the throat guard and impacted hard on the adam’s apple. The person who got hit was unable to speak for some time and was coughing and gagging.
The other was what I can only assume was supposed to be a chest shot - you dodge to the opponent’s side while drawing the sword across the chest, angling down and to the side. Instead, the amateur managed to get the sword under the short “apron” of armor we wore in front, and then up, and nailed the guy solid between his legs.
I think that “beginner’s luck” - or in other words, the experienced athlete being thrown off by how a newbie sees the sport differently - does exist, but over time it shouldn’t matter. If a beginner repeatedly beats someone who’s experienced, then the beginner has a lot of natural talent for the sport and is simply a better player, even without the background in it.
Exactly the point I was going to make, except without the gold-plated swingset (although I suppose some of the fish I’ve lost money to might spend some of it on such a set). Because I can’t really afford to play anything above micro-limits, I get a lot of opponents who either aren’t very experienced, aren’t very good, or flat-out don’t care, so they’ll call bets with nothing. Usually this works out to be a win for the players who know what the hell is going on but the dimwits outdraw it seems to me more often than they ought to. I grit my teeth and tell myself that they’re the sort of player I make money off of but having one’s AA cracked by 10-7 off-suit flopping two pair is just painful.
Yep. You can’t bluff-raise someone who isn’t even old enough to understand the rules. And who wouldn’t know a good hand if it bit her. “Gee, I don’t have anything. Just all reds with the funny little hearts on them.”
There’s nothing wrong with seeing the flop with a 10-7 off suit. It’s not a terrible hand, may as well see if you can flop into a straight draw. I’d probably call it unless someone raised before the flop, and maybe even if they only raised a little, depending on the players involved.
True in bridge as well. I play on-line bridge with a regular partner and pickup opponents. Because bridge is a game of conventions, we should predictably do better than the opponents because we’ve played together for a long time and know, more or less, what our partner’s bid means. We’ve noticed that often when we draw less experienced opponents (the bridge program keeps stats), we get hammered. Embarassingly so. Because the opponents will bid wildly, meaning that they’ll either stumble into great contracts, or avoid losing contracts that most players would bid to. What’s more, because the bidding is so erratic, we’ll have no idea what they actually have in their hands and how to defend against it. (Of course, some of the time, we do take advantage of the newbies and take their milk money, but it’s amazing how often we get crushed.)
I remember years ago David Campese the genius Australian rugby winger was being interviewed about playing in Italy. He was just about the first really professional player I remember, he was playing there in the off season for huge sums of money. He was, without a doubt, one of the most elusive ball runners ever and used to make players marking him look stupid. He said that when he first started playing in Italy he was continually getting pounded by defenders until he worked out that they were too inexperienced to fall for what he was doing. A tiny little shoulder fake that would standup an international meant nothing to an Italian club player, he would just keep coming like a train on a track. He resorted to big bold fakes and all went well again.
Having said that I played football (soccer) on and off for 20 odd years and my experience was, that while I was a reasonable player, good players had it all over me. In man on man situations there is little that you can do in defense that will get you the ball due to “unpredictability”. Similarly if you have the ball and beat your defender it is largely down to either ball control or creativity.
I used to play with a guy who would have played First Division in Scotland but for an injury. Playing against him was like playing against an adult when you are 10. I can recall a few times that I beat him and they all consisted of snap decisions that happened to work - letting the ball run between my legs and turning around him, back heading a high ball past him and chasing but I doubt that I ever got past him face to face without being run to the sideline trying. He had the good grace to applaud artful flukes.
However as a cricketer I always found the hardest players to bowl to were the occasional “naturals” you get with no technique but fantastic reflexes and hand-eye coordination. Often you can work out a plan of attack and get killed trying to execute it. These players leave huge gaps between bat and pad and blaze away as you bowl outside off but the ball just keeps hitting the middle of the bat.