At least in the games I play, chess and poker, inexperience and wild unpredictability are serious handicaps, not benefits.
CrazyCatLady sums up my feeling on the matter; the experienced player who uses unpredictability of the opponent as an excuse is looking for a trivially easy win against his inferior opponent. He’s not looking to invest the same amount of effort that would be required to defeat an opponent of equal skill. A player’s vast experience is of no value if he doesn’t actively make use of it in a contest.
In poker, you still have to do all the things you would do against a table full of good players. What are my opponents likely holding? What kind of players are they (“bad” is not an adequate answer)? Are the pot odds right? What strategies work against this group and which ones are backfiring? And so on. The payoff is that your winnings will be greater compared to executing the same plays against more skilled opponents. But you still have to put in as much effort. (Aside: T7o is a perfectly valid starting hand when sitting at a loose, passive table, close to the dealer button, and with many calls in front of you. It’s not the T7o beating the AA; it’s the full table, each with a different set of draws, beating the AA which only has two outs to improve, although of course AA is sometimes good enough to win outright.)
In chess, an opponent’s inexperienced unpredictability forces a player to throw out most of his pattern-based knowledge and fall back on strategic knowledge and pure analytic ability. But here the experienced player is much stronger and the games should result in the better player executing lower-risk strategies than he might otherwise be required to employ. In a sense the wins come easier, but easier in terms of shorter games (or a decreased length of time before a trivially won position is reached) and the amount of risk taken on in order to win, not in the amount of effort expended.
I can see how inexperienced unpredictability can introduce factors external to the main competition, though (serious injury in martial arts as pointed out here, for instance).
In my experience playing (American) football, I’d say the biggest advantage that an inferior opponent can sometimes have is the fact that you, the superior player, tend to let your guard down a little bit. You get that thought in your head, almost subconsiously: “it doesn’t matter if I’m a bit slow out of my stance, this guy’s so bad he’ll never get around my block anyway”… and then you get beat.
Also, it can sometimes be more frustrating to play an inferior opponent because it’s easier to become upset if things doing go perfectly 100% of the time. When you’re playing against a high-quality opponent, you know you won’t score evey single time you’re on offense, so getting shut down on one series isn’t unexpected. But if you’re playing an opponent that you know is a lot worse then you are, suddenly getting shut down on a series frustrates the hell out of you.
If you would routinely call a 4xBB raise with 10-7 os then I want you at my table. 10-7 os is a terrible starting hand if you don’t already have money in the pot. Calling a raise with it is poor play and I don’t care what the blinds are.
There are a few sports and games where the adage MAY be valid, but in most of them, it simply doesn’t work. Being a bad tennis player, I may do a few unexpected things in a match, things that would surprise my opponent, and I may even get lucky once or twice. But over the long run, any DECENT (let alone great) player would kill me.
Similarly, if I pitched to Barry Bonds, Barry might swing and miss at one or two of my pitches (assuming I even got them over the plate) because he wouldn’t know what to expect from me… but most of the time, he’d tattoo just about anything I threw.
I don’t know much about martial arts {I’m counting fencing and kendo here} so please rush to correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t most of them games rather than actual fights, where the aim isn’t to incapacitate your opponent by any means necessary {a la boxing, and yes, I know there are rules in boxing} but to demonstrate superior technique.
Going back to the kendo example, a move by a novice which in a real fight might result in beating your opponent {by crushing his larynx} might be disqualified as not being a legitimate play. As I understand it, kendo swords are only held in the right hand up position: anyone holding theirs left-handed might not be legal, but could result in a significant advantage against anyone who had only been trained in the correct technique.
I was going to make the poker point too (and by the way, Neurotik, Otto is right; 10-7o is a terrible hand). Playing heads-up against a really poor opponent is the same as gambling. You might as well roll dice for who gets the money.
Having a really poor opponent at a ten-hand table is, of course, a completely different thing.
Exactly, and I was trying to get at this point in my post, but wasn’t completely clear. I suspect that people who do kendo or fencing are probably more likely to be beat up by an amateur, rather than beaten by the amateur. In kendo, for instance, you have to not only call your target as you hit, but also have to be judged to have hit it “well” enough - no glancing blows or barely touching the area, and have good form. An amateur might well manage to flail and hit a target area, but I doubt the hit would meet the allowed standards if it was done in an unpredictable enough manner.
Off the top of my head, I’m not sure if there’d be an advantage from having the wrong grip. There might well be, but I suspect that the player would be called on it and told to correct the grip.
When we were both teenagers, my older brother was a serious student of chess and knew lots of openings and canned strategies. I didn’t much care, so when he would challenge me to a game, I’d basically attack at random trading pieces until the board was cleared out sufficiently, then try to do the best I could with what was left. He would usually still kick my butt, but occasionally he would get so flustered that I wasn’t “playing right” that I would squeak one out. He didn’t ask me to play much.
I think the more experienced player will win more often in the long run, but many of the minority of losses he experiences in the short run will be due to his opponent’s unpredictability. If that makes any sense.
“Experience” ought to be “experience in practicing winning strategies”. If you lose consistently to less-experienced opponents (of roughly equivalent natural ability), there is probably something wrong with how you are training. Especially if you are not training to attack “beginner mistakes”.
Bruce Lee once said that the toughest person to fight was a big, strong, well-conditioned athlete who knew nothing about fighting, but relied entirely on an all-out, maniacal attack.
Much depends, as always. There are usually areas where skill counts for more. My experience is that it counts more in groundwork than in standing work.
And perfect conditions usually help the better player. If I were going to box Mike Tyson, for instance, I would try to do so on an ice rink. It would interfere far more with his footwork than with mine, and thus be more likely to throw him off his game than me off mine.
I don’t know much about sports, but here’s my opinion on board and card games (the ones that rely on some level of deep stategy.)
In a 2-player game, the more experienced player almost always has the advantage. The inexperienced player will make more blunders which the experienced player will recognize and exploit.
In a multi-player game, it’s a bit less cut-and-dried. Random (foolish, infuriating) play by a newbie has a much greater chance of unbalancing a game where the other players know what they’re doing and throwing it into total chaos.
I found that this was particularly true when I played in a tournament of a trick-taking card game. The game had a lighthearted theme, and marketed for players 10+ but it does have some very nice stategy elements, and the tournament wasn’t a big deal. The 1st-3rd prizes were a copy of the game. Also, I should mention that this was the world premiere of the game, and nobody had played it before, so I wasn’t experienced with this game, though I had experience with other trick-taking games, of course. My first seat was at a table with a 7-year-old-girl. Smart for a 7-year-old, but still seven years old. I had my eye on the prize and was watching the play closely, trying to suss out everybody’s strong suit, etc., and then other other end of this table was this kid throwing out random crap. Ha-ha, I think, all the high cards in that suit are gone, so I lead a high card. Nope, wrong, the kid threw a crap card into that valuable trick three rounds back, and now she’s got this high card in this one, which, had I taken it would have been enough to get me one point above my closest competitor. Grrrrrrrrrrrr . . . . (I won the game, and the tournament, but I will surely go to hell for certain thoughts I had . . .)
Definately something to this argument. When I was in college I played very competitive outdoor volleyball. Nothing worse than playing picnic players, they somehow managed to stay in games because they would do the stupidest sh*t imagineable. And they always mangled the rules, but it was too much of a Pain in the backside to try and explain things too them.