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[QUOTE="Stu_Ungar, post: 1327350, member: 39779"]
I thought I'd write this little anecdote.

When I was studying economics at college, I was taught by two very intelligent economists.  One was a brilliant teacher and a great economic thinker.  His maths however was not so good.  Therefore he placed an over emphasis mathematical results.  If the answer was 7.69 or 7.94 then to him that was important.  (I think he was just impressed when people calculated stuff!!)

The other was a fantastic mathematician and had studied at the London School of Economics (probably the best place for economics i the world).

His view of mathematical results was different.  Because economics attempts to abstractly model the world, all models contain a high degree of approximation.  Therefore any answer obtained is also an  approximation.

Therefore he really wasn't interested in the actual results, he was instead interested in the order of magnitude between results.  If an answer was 7.23 and another 9.4, then as they were approximations, it meant that they were roughly the same.  If another was 7523 then clearly this was a much bigger value and that should be noted, but its exact value wasn't all that important.

The results were really only useful when comparing their orders of magnitude to other results obtained in the same manner.

So when you come up with an answer of 2% or 5% or 1.3%, don't put too much stock in the answer itself, because in isolation its meaningless.

It is showing that even a the strong player is unlikely to win, which fits with what most people would assume anyway.

Its not based on assumptions that are accurate enough to be any more precise than 'small chance'
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