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Old 08-01-2007, 03:03 PM
Dids Dids is offline
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Join Date: Feb 2004
Location: 215 lbs of fatness
Posts: 21,118
Default Hard to quantify sports question

At lunch today there was sport fishing on the TV at the bar.

I've started spending a lot of time watching various forms of racing.

The common question here:

In sports like this (I think poker kinda counts) do we know how much of the seperation between normal humans, the good, and the excellent is actually innate skill?

How much of the difference between say... Kasey Khane and Tony Stewart is driven by the infrastructure (garage, pit, crew chief, car) that supports them and how much of that is just pure raw talent? If you give the avg guy off the street 5 years to learn, and similar support to Tony, how close do you get to his results?

For sport fishing, is anybody really just a flat better fisherman, or is it more about gear/training/luck?

I think we all realize that with enough study and practice, you can be a pretty solid winner in poker, but also that there's a few intangibles that end to push people into the super upper echelon of players.

What other sports are like this? Who here is an expert on these sports that can explain to the rest of us why we're right/wrong?
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