This is quite funny thread. I often marvel at folks dissecting sport game outcome for hours retrospectively as if everything was perfectly explainable only after outcome was seen. We don't see this in HN threads much - well, except for chess games :).
In reality, pro games have such strong contenders that each have very thin edge, if at all, and the outcome is usually just same as throwing dice.
Serral for example is the current best StarCraft 2 player in the world. They operate in tournaments where X players face off usually starting with 16+ players doing single elimination. He won 4 regional, and 2 international tournaments in a row. The odds of him pulling that off if the odds of each win where close to 50/50 would be ~1/(2^30) aka 1 billion to 1. Instead, he was heavily favored in most of these match ups.
I think the previous poster was referring to sportsball/handegg type physical team sports, where there are a lot more changing variables (team composition, physical condition, stadium, weather, ...) than in chess or StarCraft.
In the US, the major team sports are not at all "very thin edge". In fact, lack of parity is a real issue facing several leagues.
Between "tanking" (teams that are deliberately bad in order to get better draft picks), massive budget differences (it's not unusual to see large-market teams with payrolls more than double those of small-market teams), and structural issues in the games themselves, parity can be very very difficult to achieve. 538 attempts to use chess-style Elo ratings to track the major sports, and currently they have:
* ~200-point difference between best and worst major-league baseball team
* ~400-point difference between best and worst NFL football team
* ~400-point difference between best and worst NBA basketball team
I was talking about teams in final games in pro sport. In these scenarios, competitors are very well matched. If outcome was predictable with very high degree of confidence in these games then people wouldn’t care much and all the reasoning chains and justifications would be offered before the games.
The top contenders in many sports got there, at least in part, by studying the tactics and strategies and outcomes of the past. Even a casual participant can learn and improve from unpacking classic games from history. This is true of every contest of ability, from chess to soccer. It is not a fruitless exercise.
However I agree that HN is not the most efficient venue for chess strategy analysis
In reality, pro games have such strong contenders that each have very thin edge, if at all, and the outcome is usually just same as throwing dice.