> Success also depends upon what game you are playing. > > For instance, take card games: many people might define success as "winning > the most hands", whereas a poker player would prefer maximizing his stake > over winning hands, and from what I've observed of bridge players, they seem > to define success as being able to know how the remainder of the hand will > play out having only seen a minimum of cards...
Games in general are different because tail risk may not exist at all (like in tic-tac-toe) for a certain strategy. The range of all outcomes if well known, can reduce the chances that you ever lose once you get to a certain point. There is no "fat tail" in tic-tac-toe unless you're playing with my son who is very likely to say, "Okay now I'm O" in the second last move. Sometimes there is way too much uncertainty, like in cricket or basketball or baseball, where the luck factor can make a substantial difference. But interesting you bring up bridge. Duplicate bridge is a game of skill where luck plays only a tiny role. Rubber bridge is much more a game of chance. A winner in duplicate may not be a pair that won most games, or even any game. They just have to beat other pairs who played the same hands. In bridge too, there's a lot of tail risk on a per-game level (like massive artificial bidding could screw up a simple game to a tough slam because they littered the early bids with cues), especially early on. I've seen the "lead" make or break a game - and you hope and hope and hope that this fellow doesn't lead a spade, and 9 out of 10 people wouldn't, but he turns out to be that 10th guy and boom, you're down 1. Poker though is a game of luck but the skilled people play it so they don't lose all their money on one table (i.e. buy in only a small percentage of your outlay, and then work the odds on each hand) Blackjack can be won if you count cards, and hike your bets when the odds are in your favour... Bridge is also a huge game of probabilities - from an unknown hand, you can narrow down the range of distributions from the bidding, then from the lead, the dummy drop and so on. The skillful player could tell you to a large degree about what his partner has during the bidding,
