In any case, the difference is not between tennis and poker, and it is not based on ethical boundaries (I do not have strong opinions about whether gambling should be legal). The difference is between high stakes negative- expected-rewards games and high stakes games where players expect positive rewards
That's absolutely fine. Just don't call it skill versus luck. Come up with new words to express the concepts you think are important; these names are taken.
The conventional way does not give you a way to measure the ingredients of skill and luck
Yes it does; one piece of evidence that tennis involves less luck than golf is that in match-play tournaments of about the same size, you're much more likely for a golfer outside the top 10 to win than for a tennis player outside the top 10 to win.
Or that baseball involves more luck than basketball, because a streak of (say) 27 wins in 30 games is much more common for a top team in basketball than baseball.
(Yes, there are differences in how level various playing fields are, but these phenomena seem to be robust across competition in high school, college and professional levels (AFAICT), so it seems like strong evidence to me. If it were important to me, I could start finding more and more objective metrics of skill versus luck in various games.)
Very good. The conventional ways you propose to measure luck and skill ingredients are precisely the same as what I would use.So my notions are consistent with the usual ones. When you say that baseball involves more luck that basketball your notion depend on the entire scenario and reward systems and not just on the rules of the games precisely as I suggest the new ingredient in my analysis is that these measures may not be robust if we change the reward system.
Gil Kalai, a well known mathematician, has this to say on the topic of chess and luck:
http://gilkalai.wordpress.com/2009/07/05/chess-can-be-a-game-of-luck/
I didn't follow his argument at all, but it seems like something other LW posters may understand, so I decided to post it here. Do comment on his arguments if you agree or disagree with him.