skill factor
Joep, I agree with the first part of your message that it was an extraordinary assemble of blackjack players (perhaps matched only by Max’s New Year Balls) but I don’t have to trump up and extol UBT as the best thing that ever happened to bj tournament world.
They are a big business that will do (right or wrong, and no matter how much self-importantly) whatever they feel is best for their business, based on their understanding of it.
I am not resigned to believe that they are “...The only hope of that ever happening again.”
David, thank you for kind words and compassion expressed toward the subject.
Of course the best way to show how three elimination hands in one tournament round lower edge of a really good tournament blackjack player would be best shown by presenting a full (and rather complicated) mathematical explanation. I am afraid that right now and right here is it is not the best time or place to do it. This is because of complexity of the subject and necessity of introducing a lot of new (to most of the readers) terms. It could easily take fifty pages of writing. Even worse, many of the subsubjects partially overlap themselves and are based on previous conclusions, so I would need to make a lot of conditional assumptions. However, I will try to present it in a more descriptive terms. This, I will post late tonight.
But first, let me add three remarks.
One. In the same sentence where I said that elimination rounds lower chances of really skillful players I also said that they level out the field – that meant that bad players would still place badly very often, average players (some skills required) would fair better, above average would perform close to what they represented, and really good players would suffer the most.
Two. My conclusions were not made to diminish the achievements of the winners. They could have played perfectly and their wins could have been representative of their skills. As well as players who had no clue could have been eliminated very fast. Right answers don’t always are product of a right process.
Three. We should separate personal feelings of involvement while playing bj tourney using this format from the effort to objectively assess and render effectiveness of skills in this particular type of blackjack tournament. Thoughtful players needed to work much harder- granted, but the efficacy of their work wasn’t proportional to the amount of hard work put in.
More later,
S. Yama
Joep, I agree with the first part of your message that it was an extraordinary assemble of blackjack players (perhaps matched only by Max’s New Year Balls) but I don’t have to trump up and extol UBT as the best thing that ever happened to bj tournament world.
They are a big business that will do (right or wrong, and no matter how much self-importantly) whatever they feel is best for their business, based on their understanding of it.
I am not resigned to believe that they are “...The only hope of that ever happening again.”
David, thank you for kind words and compassion expressed toward the subject.
Of course the best way to show how three elimination hands in one tournament round lower edge of a really good tournament blackjack player would be best shown by presenting a full (and rather complicated) mathematical explanation. I am afraid that right now and right here is it is not the best time or place to do it. This is because of complexity of the subject and necessity of introducing a lot of new (to most of the readers) terms. It could easily take fifty pages of writing. Even worse, many of the subsubjects partially overlap themselves and are based on previous conclusions, so I would need to make a lot of conditional assumptions. However, I will try to present it in a more descriptive terms. This, I will post late tonight.
But first, let me add three remarks.
One. In the same sentence where I said that elimination rounds lower chances of really skillful players I also said that they level out the field – that meant that bad players would still place badly very often, average players (some skills required) would fair better, above average would perform close to what they represented, and really good players would suffer the most.
Two. My conclusions were not made to diminish the achievements of the winners. They could have played perfectly and their wins could have been representative of their skills. As well as players who had no clue could have been eliminated very fast. Right answers don’t always are product of a right process.
Three. We should separate personal feelings of involvement while playing bj tourney using this format from the effort to objectively assess and render effectiveness of skills in this particular type of blackjack tournament. Thoughtful players needed to work much harder- granted, but the efficacy of their work wasn’t proportional to the amount of hard work put in.
More later,
S. Yama
