Edward J. Pluchar - The Blogsplitter

This deals, I would say necessarily, with the realm of physical endeavor.  I don’t think the line is very blurry between luck and skill when it comes to, say, word problems in a 7th grade math book.

Speaking of 7th grade, we had a custom in our neighborhood which was meant to prove whether a feat was luck or skill.  Let’s say you’re playing basketball, and from 50 feet away you let fly a hook shot that goes straight through the net.  Your opponents declare that it was a lucky shot.  You can argue about that all day, with some limping logic and stomping pride.  Or you could submit to a test - attempt the same shot three more times.  If you make it just one more time, it was skill.  If you fail all three times, it was luck.

Not much for a statistician, but it was good for 12 year old boys.  And never mind that our collective shooting percentage for most shots was probably right at 33%.

The debate has risen anew among men more than twice that age.

This time the game is Protect the Pin, a version of Dodgeball which includes bowling pins set up at the back of each team’s court.  To win, you can knock out all of the opposing players, or all of their pins.

The debate is related to improbable catches (which cause the thrower to lose a life) and uncanny pin shots.

(I suspect that I am only one third of the way through this post, so you may want to abandon it now if the subject is holding your interest only by a thread).

Here’s my stance:  On the individual level, real “luck” is rare.  Luck is throwing a ball into the rafters with a vague sense that it could ricochet 8 times then fall and knock over a pin.  No one anticipates 8 bounces.

However, when you’ve attempted this throw a few dozen times, you may develop a sense that the ball usually bounces and falls within a particular radius of your goal.  You throw it up the three dozenth time, aiming for a particular angle on the rafter, and the pin falls.  Skill or luck?

Additionally, I don’t think the burden of proof falls on skill.  I think skill is, for most people playing amateur sports, a matter of senses versus science.  That’s the difference between major league pitchers studying their mechanics and flag football quarterbacks heaving a ball to a downfield receiver.  (A physicist said something meaning that he and his peers tried to understand in formulas what kids understand naturally at play.)

In PTP - Say I attempt to bounce a ball off of two walls and into the pin.  This is not so outrageous, because there are only two walls, thus two angles.  Among our friends, I would guess that 33% would be a very high percentage of success for this shot, though most of us would contend that success was the result of skill.

Now let’s say that three people are guarding the pin.  A player steps up and makes that two wall throw, knocking over the pin.  With such protection, the defending team might declare this a lucky shot.  I would say it is not.  The skill level of the shot was reasonable and we can rely on our thrower to put that ball within a certain radius of the pin.  The defenders are therefore responsible for anticipating and deflecting this shot, and their failure to do so is not the result of luck on the thrower’s part.

For the team:  I think it is fair to say (again, not on a scientific basis but anecdotally) that what is considered “luck” follows from momentum.  Instead of calling it luck, though, I would call it a natural side effect, karma, or something like this.

There was a play a couple of sessions ago - I threw a ball which struck a pin (clearly not luck) and subsequently collided with a second ball.  This second ball struck the second pin, and shortly after that our team knocked over the third pin.

LUCK! cried the other team, as though we had an unfair advantage.

We did have an unfair advantage, but it wasn’t pure happenstance.  On an individual level, yes, that shot was luck.  I did not intend, or even imagine, that my ball would collide with the pin and another ball, causing that other ball to strike another pin.  However, Big Mo’ was on our side, which meant that we were firing a lot of shots at the pins all at once.  I think there’s something to say for creating the circumstances (in this case, total chaos) which allow for improbable things to happen.

Was it luck, then, on the team level?  If we went on to lose that game, or even delayed striking the third pin by more than a couple of minutes, I might say so.  But the victory, as swift and complete as it was, suggests otherwise.

Luck is catching a ball that you never saw coming until it was already stopped in your breadbasket.  Luck is throwing to hit a player on the right side of the court, who deflects the ball across the court into the left side pin.

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