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Losing in Pokemon
- Thread starter Banedon
- Start date
Abe Lincoln had a good quote about this...
I personally find the luck argument to be ridiculous. It sounds to me like a way for some players to simultaneously wave off their defeats and graciously accept their victories. You lost? Oh, it was just luck, no biggie. You won? Oh, it was nothing special, I just got lucky.
And every time I get mad at luck, I just take a nap. Too many people don't realize that breaks are needed when they're frustrated
Yep. Losing games of anything in a row will "prime" your brain for additional losses. The only way to break the trend is to essentially hard reset your mental state, by taking a break like you said.
This discussion goes back to an older topic in Stark about "skill" in Pokemon. Since you don't need dexterity to pull of attack combos in Pokemon, you don't have to aim your attacks somehow and you don't do a variety of inputs to defend yourself, etc, it doesn't fall into the traditional sense of "skill" we use in other video games. Instead, I think skill in Pokemon is more correctly viewed as "making good decisions," which goes back to another discussion I think we had around here about Game Theory and pokemon.
Viewed through the lens of Game Theory, Pokemon could be called a simultaneous game (both players make their decisions at the same time, even though the pokemon act in turns) with asymmetric information on both sides. At the start of a battle, you could view your decision matrix as something huge with a lot of unknown variables. That's why teams generally have a lead that does something specific, or a strategy of some kind other than "hit the other guy's pokemon." Based on how you've constructed your team, you may generally get higher payoffs by executing a strategy like setting up rocks, sleeping an opponent's pogey, getting behind a sub, etc. What you don't know is what is on the other guy's team, except for his starter. This is why knowledge of the game is so important, because it helps you to better estimate your potential payoffs and make decisions accordingly. With each turn of the battle, more information is revealed to you and you are able to improve your understanding of payoffs better and thus make better decisions.
Jumpman demonstrated this idea in his post on the first page. He pointed out that Player A didn't make the best possible decisions in each turn. Player A actually didn't understand his decision matrix and potential payoffs and just kept executing his strategy without making an adjustment. While those actions may have been the right move in MOST battles, the available information should have caused Player A to rapidly adjust his strategy instead of blindly following a normal strategy. It's like starting with a pocket pair in a game of Hold Em, but refusing to fold when higher cards comes down in the flop and everyone ahead of you bets out. You MIGHT still win, but your chances from before the flop to after the flop actually changed drastically, so you need to adjust your potential payoffs and make better decisions based on the newly available information.
Sure Pokemon, just like Poker, has some luck involved. Crits, long/short sleep, sleeptalk move selection, evasion, etc, are going to have an impact on some battles. It is also possible that you are going to run into an opposing team that counters you at every turn. That may be because they "got lucky," but you could also consider that they made better decisions constructing their team, that they have better knowledge than you of the game, that they have MORE knowledge than you (perhaps they played your team in a previous match and remember it), or that they are just better at deciding when to execute the higher risk but higher reward moves in their decision matrix. None of that is luck. It's all about making good decisions, which I reiterate is probably the #1 skill you can have in pokemon.
So yes, luck can have an impact in Pokemon, but over the course of time it mostly balances out. Most of the time your Stone Edge is going to hit. Most of the time Snow Cloak won't activate and keep you from landing that important strike. The problem is that players get hyper focused on the times when things don't work out, rather than all the times they do, and decide that luck determines everything. This is bad reasoning.
Now, one could argue that at a certain level, where both players have nearly equal knowledge of the game and nearly equal ability to review their decision matrix and make good choices, that the luck becomes most important. I would argue that's only the case if you really are JUST even and only if you view each single game as an instance against which to measure "luck determines everything," and if your win/loss rate hovers around 50%. Over time, you may be winning 75% of your matches against those people or even losing 45% of the time, of what you assume are "nearly equal" to you in skill, when in reality the figures suggest there is a difference.
Luck is a factor, but a much smaller one that people suppose. But to blame luck for all outcomes is like looking at a pro basketball team and saying they hit 74% from the floor tonight so they were "lucky" to win. Maybe that day, in that instance, they had a spark of inspiration or they prepared just right and executed well and earned their win. Likewise, when someone wins in pokemon, you could just blame it on luck or you can assume that they made the best preparations possible (team building) and made good decisions to earn the win. To blame luck for everything is just a cop-out and not an honest or fair way to examine the game.
Viewed through the lens of Game Theory, Pokemon could be called a simultaneous game (both players make their decisions at the same time, even though the pokemon act in turns) with asymmetric information on both sides. At the start of a battle, you could view your decision matrix as something huge with a lot of unknown variables. That's why teams generally have a lead that does something specific, or a strategy of some kind other than "hit the other guy's pokemon." Based on how you've constructed your team, you may generally get higher payoffs by executing a strategy like setting up rocks, sleeping an opponent's pogey, getting behind a sub, etc. What you don't know is what is on the other guy's team, except for his starter. This is why knowledge of the game is so important, because it helps you to better estimate your potential payoffs and make decisions accordingly. With each turn of the battle, more information is revealed to you and you are able to improve your understanding of payoffs better and thus make better decisions.
Jumpman demonstrated this idea in his post on the first page. He pointed out that Player A didn't make the best possible decisions in each turn. Player A actually didn't understand his decision matrix and potential payoffs and just kept executing his strategy without making an adjustment. While those actions may have been the right move in MOST battles, the available information should have caused Player A to rapidly adjust his strategy instead of blindly following a normal strategy. It's like starting with a pocket pair in a game of Hold Em, but refusing to fold when higher cards comes down in the flop and everyone ahead of you bets out. You MIGHT still win, but your chances from before the flop to after the flop actually changed drastically, so you need to adjust your potential payoffs and make better decisions based on the newly available information.
Sure Pokemon, just like Poker, has some luck involved. Crits, long/short sleep, sleeptalk move selection, evasion, etc, are going to have an impact on some battles. It is also possible that you are going to run into an opposing team that counters you at every turn. That may be because they "got lucky," but you could also consider that they made better decisions constructing their team, that they have better knowledge than you of the game, that they have MORE knowledge than you (perhaps they played your team in a previous match and remember it), or that they are just better at deciding when to execute the higher risk but higher reward moves in their decision matrix. None of that is luck. It's all about making good decisions, which I reiterate is probably the #1 skill you can have in pokemon.
So yes, luck can have an impact in Pokemon, but over the course of time it mostly balances out. Most of the time your Stone Edge is going to hit. Most of the time Snow Cloak won't activate and keep you from landing that important strike. The problem is that players get hyper focused on the times when things don't work out, rather than all the times they do, and decide that luck determines everything. This is bad reasoning.
Now, one could argue that at a certain level, where both players have nearly equal knowledge of the game and nearly equal ability to review their decision matrix and make good choices, that the luck becomes most important. I would argue that's only the case if you really are JUST even and only if you view each single game as an instance against which to measure "luck determines everything," and if your win/loss rate hovers around 50%. Over time, you may be winning 75% of your matches against those people or even losing 45% of the time, of what you assume are "nearly equal" to you in skill, when in reality the figures suggest there is a difference.
Luck is a factor, but a much smaller one that people suppose. But to blame luck for all outcomes is like looking at a pro basketball team and saying they hit 74% from the floor tonight so they were "lucky" to win. Maybe that day, in that instance, they had a spark of inspiration or they prepared just right and executed well and earned their win. Likewise, when someone wins in pokemon, you could just blame it on luck or you can assume that they made the best preparations possible (team building) and made good decisions to earn the win. To blame luck for everything is just a cop-out and not an honest or fair way to examine the game.