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"Much of what we experience in life results from a combination of skill and luck," writes esteemed analyst Michael Mauboussin. And while he doesn't name-check Mario Kart explicitly, I think we all know what he's getting at.Mauboussin's 2012 book The Success Equation is all about figuring out the relative values of skill and luck. The former head of global financial strategies at Credit Suisse even managed to work out a method for plotting the big US team sports along a 'skill-luck continuum', where pure luck activities like roulette live at one end, and a pure skill endeavour like chess lives at the other. Basketball, apparently, lies much closer to the skill end than ice hockey, despite huge reserves of talent exhibited in both sports - it all comes down to factors like the number of scoring opportunities per game, and the relative impact of each team's best player. But it doesn't stop at the NBA or NHL - it can broadly be applied to almost anything. Like Mario Kart, for example.
It was my first thought, anyway. I looked over his complex mathematics, pieced together from techniques used by the sports data analysis 'moneyball' crowd and applied to things like high-risk investing and business strategies, and I thought: finally. Finally, I can figure out exactly how much Mario Kart 8 screws me over.
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