@ Satis: yes, there are differences between absolutely horrid wines and delightful wines and they can be tasted by most people with some experience. But (paid) 'high-level' wine-tasting, the stuff done at competitions and to select the best wine from a selection of great wines, is a scam. There's even evidence that most of the 'experts' are just faffing about. Check this:
http://www.seattleweekly.com/2002-02-20 ... candal.php
 | | | | Quote: Brochet employed three distinct methodologies: computerized textual analysis of over 100,000 expert tasting notes (including 9,000 by American wine guru Robert M. Parker Jr.); comparison of ratings by expert tasters in totally blind and open tastings of the same wines; and real-time functional magnetic imaging of the brains of tasters in the act of tasting.
After appropriate statistical massaging, Brochet's results prove that a lot of what wine connoisseurs say about wine is humbug: A side-by-side chart of best-to-worst rankings of 18 wines by a roster of experienced tasters showed about as much consistency as a table of random numbers.
To collect his own tasting data, Brochet played a couple pretty dirty tricks on his volunteers. In one tasting, he served a white wine and elicited all the usual descriptions: "fresh, dry, honeyed, lively." Later he served the same wine dyed red: Out came the red terms: "intense, spicy, supple, deep." In another test, he submitted a mid-range Bordeaux in two different bottles, one labeled as a cheap table wine, the other bearing a grand cru etiquette: Guess which one was "woody, complex, and round" and which was "short, light, and faulty"? | | | | |
| | | | Quote: It's much the same lesson taught by UW psych prof Elizabeth Loftus' studies of how "eyewitnesses" can remember events they never saw: Words and concepts and expectations trump perception every time; and among the senses themselves, the eyes have it all over smell, taste, and touch.
Touch? You bet; almost all red wines have some tannins in them, extracted from the grape skins during fermentation along with the pigments that make them red in the first place. Tannins feel "rough" on the tongue. You'd think that anybody, let alone a veteran wine taster, would notice the absence of such a basic sensory datum.
And in fact, a small percentage of drinkers do. "About 2 to 3 percent of people detect the white wine flavor," Brochet told an interviewer last month, "but invariably they have little experience with wine culture. . . . Connoisseurs, . . . the more training they have, the more mistakes they make." Words to live by—and not just when drinking wine. | | | | |
@ J: oh I didn't mean to say that there wasn't any skill involved in poker, just that it's a much smaller part of the equation than luck. I don't really accept cash games or any tournament game with a significant buy-in (or an automatic ticket as a former winner/pro player) as evidence for any sort of major performance gap with amateur players, as the treshold for your average amateur player is too high - they don't have enough starting money to run with the big guys.
A more interesting phenomenon is the recent rise of internet poker. There are several high-level poker events that have internet qualifiers at their main events these days, guys that usually have some experience in poker but aren't anywhere near pros when it comes to money and concern. And guess what? I just looked at the 'main event' for the World Series of Poker, the biggest tournament in the world (which allows celebs, pro players, amateurs who buy in for a big amount of cash and qualifiers and internet qualifiers), and in the last 5 years a pro won only once. All the others were amateur qualifiers.
In fact, most of the former winners don't even do all that well. There were 20 former winners of the main event (master poker players, if you will) at the start of the event. Of those, 55 % (!!) was eliminated on the first day. Another 30% was eliminated on the second day. 3 of the 20 starters, or 18%, survived the first two days and only 2 of them finished in the money (in 329th and 45th place respectively). Now...that looks like an almost random performance to me, given these guys' experience with pressure, the game and the skill they have - which, again, I do believe exists.
On another note, I once saw a reporter ask a poker champ what his odds of winning the final table were, given that he was "the best player in the world". His answer was: "I've got about 13% of the chips, and you say I'm the best player in the world, so I'd say about 20%". 7%...that was his estimation of the skill factor as the best player in the world.
Put it this way: if you let the past 10 winners of Roland Garros, Wimbledon, the American Open and the Australian Open all autmatically participate in the tournament, there is no chance that 82% of them will be elminated by the second day. In fact, I'm pretty sure a majority will make it to the top half of the tournament. The randomness factor is mitigated by the skill they posses. But poker? It's a game of luck, and a small amount of factors like experience, counting cards and psychological understanding of your opponents. But those things aren't too hard too master, only the latter could be considered hard for the above-averagely intelligent person.
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I need you to understand this: they aren't just not doing better than the natural evolution of the market, they do considerably worse. In fact, you could probably match or improve your own stock performance by randomly picking them. But at the same time, these guys are hauling in serious salaries and bonuses.
Clearly, he's insane. You will never win a poker tournament purely on skill - but you can win it purely on luck. Those guys who're "at the top" playing the big leagues for big cash aren't there because they're better than most of the other players in the world - they got lucky breaks.
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