To people who say JW or other pros makes a "stupid play", consider this:

Firstly, outcome orientedness is the worst behaviour, generally speaking, analyst or not. Now I've said that, let's get into the meat of it:



Our ability to judge plays is unreliable. Analysis is based on creating a model of thought through observations (the gathering of empirical evidence).



When it comes to analysis or judging plays in a game like Counter-Strike, is that we do not currently have the proper analytical tools for macro or micro insights. We can't even rely on empirical evidence because again, samples sizes are too small and variables are too great (thanks Valve for all the constant gameplay updates). It's currently impossible to isolate conditions or probabilities properly to truly understand whether a play is "positive expected value" or not. A player achieves understanding of this, purely through intuition, by grinding experience (running through as many variables as possible) in the game and conditioning himself to feel out micro edges relative to the possibilities of his skill.



Think of poker and the way that they are able to isolate probabilities and create a mathematical process which is simple to calculate whether they reach a positive expected value or not (which is the same as saying "the best play" on average discounting overall variance). The big variable we have is individual skill. Staying true to the poker example, this is like saying no hand has an inherent value. It's like lumping in the ability to represent certain hands with the quality of what you actually hold, and assuming your opponent is mostly going to believe that bluff; the idea of whether the bluff is called is also like the variance of your top individual performance on which you risk the play, which has inherent inconsistency, the swings depending on the player.



When you have a player like JW, Guardian, KennyS (to name some highly skilled AWP players), or any other player with a much higher skill ceiling than the average professional player, the percentages to the +EV play change- they are operating outside of the "norm". So when they fail they look stupid, because our observations, on average, with a low sample size, show us they are deviating from the norm expectation for a +EV play. However, in reality, on the absolute top level, the way you exert edges is what wins you matches, and that's what it takes to be the best.



So to leave you with a fun summary or discussion point: A +EV play is constantly in motion, tethered to individual skill, it does not conform to any single model of thought. We cannot be outcome oriented.



Disclaimer: I suck at poker.

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