How Often Would The Strongest Player Make The Final Table? - My estimate

[Xavier]

There is no mathematical way to work out someones abolity to cash, as luck is a factor involved, which you can relate to as a %, which means your missing that from your equation, which makes it bs, sorry...

BS back to you. I have taken the luck factor into account by saying the best player will double up 75% of the time. If there was no luck involved tehy would just double up 100% of the time.

 

[Stu_Ungar]

BS back to you. I have taken the luck factor into account by saying the best player will double up 75% of the time. If there was no luck involved tehy would just double up 100% of the time.

I'm not sure your assumptions are well founded.

Given that your assumptions are correct, then the answer you derive is also correct.

However I'm not sure how accurate your assumptions are. I'm not saying they are wrong, I'm saying that in order to use this line of reasoning you have to show that your assumptions are accurate.

That in itself is quite difficult. How do you rate and rank players? How do you first identify the strongest player in the world? How do you compare him to the second strongest player, and the third and so on? Can you simply assign points to their ranking or is the difference in skill between the third and fourth player, for instance, different to the difference between the 9th and tenth?

So firstly how do you identify the strongest player?

How do you then take into account the strength of the field?

Thirdly how do you aproximate the luck throughout the field? For instance, if the weakest player has a very good run of cards, would that have as much impact as the second strongest having the same run?

Position, seats are randomly assigned, however how many tournaments are required before seat allocation enters into the long run?

There are other things to consider too.

I just think its too complex a situation to accurately model and sweeping approximations make the results a bit meaningless.

 

[Stu_Ungar]

I thought I'd write this little anecdote.

When I was studying economics at college, I was taught by two very intelligent economists. One was a brilliant teacher and a great economic thinker. His maths however was not so good. Therefore he placed an over emphasis mathematical results. If the answer was 7.69 or 7.94 then to him that was important. (I think he was just impressed when people calculated stuff!!)

The other was a fantastic mathematician and had studied at the London School of Economics (probably the best place for economics i the world).

His view of mathematical results was different. Because economics attempts to abstractly model the world, all models contain a high degree of approximation. Therefore any answer obtained is also an approximation.

Therefore he really wasn't interested in the actual results, he was instead interested in the order of magnitude between results. If an answer was 7.23 and another 9.4, then as they were approximations, it meant that they were roughly the same. If another was 7523 then clearly this was a much bigger value and that should be noted, but its exact value wasn't all that important.

The results were really only useful when comparing their orders of magnitude to other results obtained in the same manner.

So when you come up with an answer of 2% or 5% or 1.3%, don't put too much stock in the answer itself, because in isolation its meaningless.

It is showing that even a the strong player is unlikely to win, which fits with what most people would assume anyway.

Its not based on assumptions that are accurate enough to be any more precise than 'small chance'