[This feels like it needs another pass through, but I’ve been engaged in other emergencies all evening. I’ll probably polish this while on vacation.]
As formulated by David Sklansky, The Fundamental Theory of Poker is as follows:
"Every time you play a hand differently from the way you would have played it if you could see all your opponents' cards, they gain; and every time you play your hand the same way you would have played it if you could see all their cards, they lose."
If I had knowledge of everyone else's hand, I'd bet correctly and accordingly. Perfect information of that means that bluffing is useless, the only thing that matters is the relative strength of your own hand versus that of all your opponents. Once that is understood, you can apply the logic of Sklansky's theorem probabilistically where you can sum the possible outcomes based on all cards that a player could have, and calculate the expected value.
Sklansky is speaking in terms of local maxima and minima for gaining and losing. The best decision in poker is often to take the least negative result available, i.e. to cut your losses and fold.
We like Sklansky, he gives excellent snarky quotes in his work, and there's a long-standing throughline of former quiz bowl players trying, and sometimes succeeding, in playing professional poker. I've seen people refer to Sklansky's theory as applicable to quiz bowl, but it's not really. Where in poker there's lots of decisions make by multiple parties, and lots of betting options, there's really only one betting decision in quiz bowl, whether I am going to be the one to buzz in first.
We can really only consider a poker hand's equivalent to contested tossup questions, and the bonus question is only for determining the value we assess to outcomes of the tossup. The tossup is the only valid part of this because it is the only part which has interaction with an opponent.
Where it looks similar is in the idea of hidden information. If you had access to the clues in the question that haven't been read yet, and if you had access to your opponents' knowledge of the subjects, you'd be able to make an enlightened decision on where they'd buzz in, and get out ahead of them. The problem is all of that information is not just hidden, it's unknowable and unquantifiable, and could not be calculated as a question is read.
Sklansky's theory isn't applicable to quiz bowl in the whole, but it IS applicable to the decision to buzz on a tossup.
When I buzz in ahead of my opponent, it doesn't matter whether I buzz in a millisecond before my opponent would have buzzed, or three lines before my opponent. And the reverse is true. What matters is that at the point of buzz, the player who buzzed has control of the general outcome of the question. If the expected value of that buzz has a positive result (a correct answer and the subsequent bonus points) that player and their team gains, and if the expected value of that buzz would have a negative result (the penalty, the other team's correct answer, and the bonus points), that player and their team loses.
Not taking into account the game situation, when a player actually feels comfortable in their knowledge that they are willing to buzz, most outcomes in that moment are probabilistically positive for them.
Poker is a game with a finite set of hidden information that always has a set of general outcomes, but an immensely larger set of betting actions and outcomes that affect whether you believe your decision was correct. Sklansky's theory is useful in that it simplifies that series of decisions down to a binary outcome. A quizbowl question doesn't need that simplification. There's four outcomes with different values for the outcomes:
You buzz first and are correct
You buzz first and are incorrect
Your opponent buzzes first and is correct
Your opponent buzzes first and is incorrect
Taken together the first two options are more favorable to you, the last two taken together are less favorable. If you’re willing to buzz with the knowledge you have at that point, your result will likely be positive
The modification of Sklansky's theory that we could apply is "Every time I buzz in at the same point as I would if I knew when my opponent would buzz, I gain, and if given that information about my opponent, I would have changed when I buzz, I lose."
If you apply this modified version of Sklansky's theory, you have a metric that you can apply to your own performance, at a very granular level.
That metric is separate from the scoreboard. If you are always gaining by this metric, you are contributing to the success of your team, and not making mistakes. It allows you to quantify ideas like "I am being too timid in buzzing." or "I am being reckless in my buzzing." And it allows you a metric to sense your own success. It's easy to tell you when a mistake is made during a buzz, but it is hard to teach someone that a mistake is made in not buzzing, or that not buzzing was the perfect play at that point.
Some side notes:
Giving up on a question, whether it's apparent or not to your opponent, is a bad idea. If your opponent knows that you're conceding action to them, they will take advantage of that. And if your teammate counters “we could be lull them into a false sense of security by looking like we're giving up?” Tell them “they're not that good of an actor.”
There is also the psychological value of making correct decisions and knowing the decisions you make are correct. Here Sklansky is valuable for both quiz bowl and poker. The psychological value of having a running metric of whether you've acted correctly at each step of a series of events is immense.
While Sklansky is slightly applicable for quiz bowl, it is a great deal more applicable for a certain types of quiz bowl competition: any type of goldfish competition models poker more closely.
"Goldfish" as a term probably came to quiz bowl from Magic: the Gathering, though it may have earlier origins. The idea in Magic is how fast can one's deck deliver a lethal amount of damage to an opponent, if the opponent doesn't respond to anything, or if you were playing against an opponent without memory or unable to act. If your opponent were a goldfish in a bowl, unable to draw a hand or play cards what sort of score could you run up.
The extension to quiz bowl is if you played a packet against no opponent, what would your score be? Up to the mid-90's this would be a boring question to answer, as the optimal strategy was known for that: answer every tossup at the end of the question, to maximize your chance of getting bonus questions and minimize your chance to neg. Once you introduced power tossup points, there's more strategy in trying to collect 15's, but getting more bonus opportunities remains the dominant strategy for most teams.
A goldfish competition is conducted by having all the teams in competition play the same packet against an empty opposing team. Then the results of each team is considered to evaluate who answered where, or who answered correctly. This is why a Goldfish test is a better for evaluation via Sklansky? Because goldfish competition allows you to model many opponents at once. By matching your team against the field you can develop an estimate of what the average team would do against your team in competition.
A series of Goldfish competitions were held in high school quiz bowl in the 2000's, principally organized by Phil Blessman at Culver Academies in Indiana. These recorded the results of a series of tossups and awarded points based on the position in the question.
To a certain degree NAQT's Buzzword is a Goldfish competition, awarding additional points to a buzz early in the question, but unlike power points, it's done on a sliding scale from the first clue to the last.
A proposed competition for 2023 would take goldfish competition and apply the results of each team and match them pairwise with each other team in the field, effectively playing dozens of matches at once. (I know there's a college sports ranking system which approximates this, but it's late and I'm blanking on the name of the process.)
There was an earlier precedent to Goldfish competitions in quiz bowl and that was the Knowledge Master Open, created by Academic Hallmarks. I never got to play the old version, but I suspect for question security purposes the correctness of the answers and the time results were somewhat hidden from the players until after the competition ended, to prevent cheating.
As I said I never competed in KMO but I can appreciate the value that those internationally compared results gave to teams. There had to be a tremendous amount of excitement in each school when the results came in the mail.
KMO died in the 2000s because it was tied to old technology, you had to have a disk mailed to you, and each school's results had to be mailed back and then compiled one at a time, and the paper copy of the final results sent to all schools via USPS. This plus the change and incompatibility of operating systems from the 1980s to 2000s moved the underlying software from a wonder to a burden.
KMO was restarted in 2021 by Academic Hallmarks' new management, but it hasn't publicly posted the full results as it had in previous years.
The key value of the goldfish structure is to have a big field to generate lots of opponents for comparison, versus seeing how you compete in tournaments. Goldfish allows for the probabilistic view of the field, where a tournament is a particular sample of what could happen. It allows a collection of data that allows the team to compare performance.
Goldfish could be simulated in the practice environment if everyone submitted their practice buzzes on a single packet of questions to a central database. It would only require the data be collected and processed. It could help quantify what a team would face in an average team, in bonus conversion, or strength in categories. A lot of things which don't have a metric now could be quantified a little. And things that can't be calculated in the moment wouldn't have to be.
One of the biggest potential shifts to social media happened last week with Instagram introducing Threads. In general, the introduction of a new social media platform with the ability to connect large populations of people is a good thing. For quiz bowl, I'm worried this will not result in large populations of interested people connecting, but a further breakdown in communications between sections of the quiz bowl community.
The expected migration out of twitter is problematic for me, due to it being a splitting out to multiple locations. If people interested in quiz bowl migrate to multiple locations, and both ends are acting as walled gardens, it becomes difficult to propagate interest in quiz bowl without following up in multiple media. The second problem is that multiple locations of social media allows bad actors and accidentally created bad situations to expand without being addressed. Now I mean by this that multiple social media means multiple paths for question security to be violated. I saw this on twitter, where a new player was excited about their first buzz and showed the question. This was able to be quickly shot down by the hosts and watchful people who got them to take down the tweet. That is possible when you have eyes watching for it and following general quiz bowl search criteria. Twitter had lots of technical glitches, but its search capability had been extremely good for a very long time. The other services are unproven in their ability to search, and through that their ability to assist the community in policing themselves. A split migration means a bad actor could cheat in a channel there not enough people are watching to prevent it.
Historically, when social media breaks down, or is in flux with migrations of people between main services, the general trend of quizbowl is decline or at best stagnation. This threatens to be one of those times, until one side or the other takes a dominant position, and pulls the majority of conversations into its orbit.
[Next week, I will be on vacation, but this will be appearing in your inbox as normal. The pieces for the next two weeks have been written and are getting queued up tonight. I hope to return to a normal Wednesday night writing session in three weeks, having spent the interim filling in holes in the book that is to come.]