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Comment by smallnamespace | Hacker News Reader

> Came to say this - Hosoi should compare the top 0.01% of fantasy players against each other and report back

Why?

If you really did that, then every single game would be considered a game of chance, even chess.

I don't necessarily agree with the article's conclusions, but only comparing the top players isn't a legitimate thing to do -- if you take any distribution and zoom in at the extremes, it will look just like noise.

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It's not as ridiculous as you think. To continue to abuse the hockey analogy, there are ~979000 registered hockey players in the US and Canada[1]. There are 30 NHL teams, each with a contract limit of 50, for a total of 1500 players. That's 0.153% of all hockey players in North America.

EDIT: Need to read better, that's an order of magnitude off so it is a bit ridiculous.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_hockey#Number_of_registere...

I think you're missing what I'm saying.

The criticism is, 'I don't like the article's metric because it doesn't zoom in on the tail of the distribution'.

But if you do that with any game, the answer you will get is uniformly 0.5, even when comparing chess to tic tac toe.

No I understand your argument, I'm just trying to illustrate how small a part of the tail professional sports really is (turns out it's small but not that small).

Depends on the sport. For NBA and NFL athletes in the US, it is close to 1 in 10k high school athletes in those sports that make it to the pros

I think schwap's point was that you can't draw the conclusion "Fantasy games are more games of skill than their professional counterparts" when you're comparing people self-selected to have close to even skill levels (elite athletes) to a random sampling of the population.

Of course there's more skill advantage in a random sampling than a sample biased by skill.

They're basically saying that in RL sport, the skill level at that top level is so close that 'chance' has a significant impact on the outcomes. However, the skill gap between 2 random players of fantasy sport is so large that chance has very little impact.

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