Absolutely, and the gap is so deceptive - it doesn't look like there's that much of a gap when you watch the pros. Like I watch pro badminton players, and compared to the best guys at my club who've trained for 10+ years it looks like they both play the same. But the guys at my club have no hope of winning provincial level tournaments here - like they're lucky to even make the quarterfinals, 0% chance of beating the top few players in the province. And the guy that wins provincial level tournaments here has no hope of winning national level tournaments - he rarely makes it past the first round, 0% chance of beating the top 5 players in the country. And the guys that win national level tournaments here have no hope of winning high grade international level tournaments - they could maybe pull an upset on a top 10 player 5-10% of the time.

But from my position, it's easy to watch the pros play and think "wow, that looks doable in 10 years of hard work". Yet so many people have put in that much work and still are effectively as far away from those pros as I am.

> Absolutely, and the gap is so deceptive - it doesn't look like there's that much of a gap when you watch the pros.

It's the unknown unknown. I used to play a lot of ball and lucked into playing pick up with some good college players and even ex-pros who played over seas. Until I had that experience, I had no idea how much better they were.

There's also nuance in the sport that requires knowledge to see the difference between top players. For example, when I started training BJJ all black belts were the same - as in they easily kicked my ass. After a few years of training, they still easily kick my ass, but I can feel the difference and have some idea just from our rolling which ones are better than the others.

I've played NBA players a few times. I was a quite good YMCA level player. What you can't imagine is just how fast they are. But what most people really don't see on TV is how strong they are. My brother blocked a European pro player's shot at the rim and above the rim. That guy just brought his other hand up and dunked it through.

Scalabrine closer to LeBron James than the likes of me are to him? He's a lot closer. But I considered it an absolute privilege to be on the court with these guys. Fact is, they were actually really nice. I got a compliment on my rebounding. The second time I walked into the gym when this NBA player I'd played against was there, he came over and said hi. He came over to say hi.

Scalabrine is very accessible and does regular interviews and has talked extensively about "The Scallenge" (where he challenged several high level non-professional players in one-on-one). One extremely insightful point he once made on Duncan Robinson's podcast is that part of the reason he's "closer to LeBron" is that he's played LeBron. He wouldn't be a good player if he hadn't played professionally against top-level talent. It might not be worth it to dedicate yourself like that, but that kind of dedication and commitment to competition is probably the only way you will achieve close to a high level and even then, you may end up only an also-ran.

Chess ratings make this point really strikingly.

A rating difference of 400 points means that the better player will score 0.9 on average (where 0=loss, 0.5=draw, 1=win).

A typical hobby player might have a rating of 1600. A good player at a chess club will have a rating of around 2000, meaning that they beat the hobby player around 90% of the time. A low-level grandmaster will have a rating around 2400, meaning that they beat the strong club player 90% of the time. The top few chess players in the world have ratings around 2800, meaning that they beat low-level grandmasters 90% of the time.

You might think the top human players are nearly perfect, but the top chess engines running on an average desktop computer are probably >800 Elo points above the top humans, and they're getting about 100 Elo points stronger every year, based purely on algorithmic improvements (not computing power).

It's more likely for the stronger player to have 8 wins and 2 draws in that line-up. If you're up against such a big divide you should play safe and aim for the draw, it's quite attainable.

I simplified a bit by saying the stronger player wins 90% of the time. They score 0.9 on average. That could be 9 wins and one loss, or as you say, 8 wins and 2 draws.

You would think that a low-level GM would be able to achieve more draws against the super GMs, but somehow the ratings indicate they don't. It may be that the super GMs deliberately avoid drawish lines against much weaker players and try to keep the game complicated.

Years ago I watched a documentary on the World Series of Poker. They asked one of the top players if he was a gambling addict. His response was essentially, "To reach our level of play, you pretty much have to be." This is true to be the best in really anything. I've had the privilege to meet people who are considered the best in the world in a couple of different disciplines. They all see to have similar traits, bad home life, most of the alcoholics, obsessive. Losing everything else seems to be the price of greatness in a discipline.

For the most part I agree. But that said, there are definitely exceptions. Some truly world-class scrabble (and poker) players are well-adjusted, nice, friendly people, who seem otherwise normal.

No, you're absolutely right. There are a number of people who are phenomenal at what they do, and balance their personal lives as well.

edit: I would say some (not a lot) great people. I really do think it is an exception, but they are out there.

“These Regular Guys Challenged An NBA Player And Instantly Regretted It” https://youtu.be/i93vF0WOX6w

Your friendly neighborhood normal distribution curve and z score makes this pretty easy to fathom. The z score of a 50th percentile player is 0. A player who is 1 standard deviation above the mean is about 84th percentile. The z score of a 99th percentile player (let's say Brian) is ~2.4. The z score of a 99.99th percentile player (grandmaster or lebron james) is ~3.8

So with these hand waving assumptions, Brian's comment holds true if the ymca players are <= 84th percentile of basket ball players. Sounds reasonable to me.

I took my own crack at this, because I think your numbers - intended to show the big separation - still make it seem too easy! Lebron is NOT just a 99.99th percentile player!

There's fewer than 500 players in the NBA. There are hundreds of millions of people in the US (being US-centric initially to try to do the YMCA comparison), so probably a few million that play frequently as amateurs? One in a hundred? Let's call it 3 million out of 300,000,000, to work with relatively round numbers.

So being in the best 1 out of 100 - top 99% - is a z score of 2.3. Being in the best 500 is then much smaller even than THAT! 99.983%, z score of 3.481. The single best one? 99.99997%, z score of 4.991.

So if you define closer by z score, they "good amateur" YMCAer is closer to the worst in the NBA than that person is to Lebron, but I think it's more meaningful to define closer by "how many people stand in between you and them" - and the answer is millions for the amateur.

And I think that shows that work alone only gets you so far compared to talent. If you and a million other amateurs all start putting in ten hour days, the vast majority of you aren't getting to the NBA - it's just not big enough.

That is sort of interesting. Depending on how extremely good Lebron James is at basketball could make Brian's statement false. I think I disagree that number of people is a meaningful metric. The difference between you and I, assuming we're both near average competency, could be millions of people, while the difference between Lebron and Brian could be just hundreds or thousands of people but represent a substantially larger skill gap. Otherwise you're suggesting that the more skilled two players are, the less noteworthy differences in skill are because there's fewer people around them to measure with.

That's true, we could be separated by millions of people but at the same time only, say, a year's worth of two-hours-a-week practice.

But in the absence of a reliable way to measure absolute skill, the z score one does seem about as good as we can get, though it can't truly answer something like "Lebron vs Jordan" - and you also would get different numbers depending on which population you picked. Population of the world, population of the US, population of the basketball-playing world, population of people who play basketball at least once a month? That's gonna change the denominator for the percentiles for the Scalabrines and Lebrons both.

I like this but you might want to up the z score for LeBron. GM is 2500 plus norms. LeBron has 4 rings and 4 MVPs. He would be Magnus level or at least one of the few who hit 2800 (there have only been 13).

NB: I'm a huge LeBron fan and a huge Magnus fan.

I think it was Bill Murray that had a quote/idea that in the Olympics they should have a regular person compete in each sport for reference.