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<blockquote data-quote="FireLance" data-source="post: 4993305" data-attributes="member: 3424">I don't think they are common in competitive sports, though. Even in golf, I believe the handicap system does not apply to professional competitions. What most sports do is to use a league or category system (e.g. weight categories in boxing) so that individual competitors are more evenly matched, and so there is some uncertainty over the outcome of each competition. Exceptional sportsmen, while almost certain to beat &quot;ordinary&quot; human beings at their sport, are usually close enough to their nearest competitors that even the best (however you measure that) may be beaten by the second (or third or fourth, etc.) best from time to time. In a match where one competitor outclasses the others so much that there is not even the hope that he could be beaten, such as a race between Dash and normal humans (yes, even Usain Bolt), then something else must be done to maintain interest. To a certain extent, the Harlem Globetrotters addressed this by playing to entertain instead of simply playing to beat their opponents. So, even if the outcome of the game is more or less a given, for example, a game in which Batman is guaranteed to beat the Joker <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink&nbsp; &nbsp; ;)"&nbsp; data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />, it simply means that you need to be more creative about ways to maintain interest in the game.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="FireLance, post: 4993305, member: 3424"] I don't think they are common in competitive sports, though. Even in golf, I believe the handicap system does not apply to professional competitions. What most sports do is to use a league or category system (e.g. weight categories in boxing) so that individual competitors are more evenly matched, and so there is some uncertainty over the outcome of each competition. Exceptional sportsmen, while almost certain to beat "ordinary" human beings at their sport, are usually close enough to their nearest competitors that even the best (however you measure that) may be beaten by the second (or third or fourth, etc.) best from time to time. In a match where one competitor outclasses the others so much that there is not even the [I]hope[/I] that he could be beaten, such as a race between Dash and normal humans (yes, even Usain Bolt), then something else must be done to maintain interest. To a certain extent, the Harlem Globetrotters addressed this by playing to entertain instead of simply playing to beat their opponents. So, even if the outcome of the game is more or less a given, for example, a game in which Batman is guaranteed to beat the Joker ;), it simply means that you need to be more creative about ways to maintain interest in the game. [/QUOTE]

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