[hnkain]

Significance works the other way round than you described it -- if two players were equal in skill, then a winrate of -91mbb/g or larger would happen 5-10% of the time.

I don't know if Doug Polk understands that or not, but I agree with his criticism and I think his analogy with sports reporting is sound. While "statistical tie" is true in a technical sense, it's not usually how matches are reported, and it's somewhat disingenuous and self-serving to use that language. It would be more honest to say that it's very unlikely that bot is better than humans -- given the advantages the bot had (a gruelling 2-week schedule, and pressure on the humans to get through N hands per day) it still lost by a significant margin.

[conistonwater]

You're right, I would have liked them to report posterior probabilities, but those were p-values instead.

> It would be more honest to say that it's very unlikely that bot is better than humans

I don't think the analogy is sound. Consider the alternative: over a long match, the humans failed to beat the bot convincingly. But in any case, the examples he gives are so wide of the mark that it's clear this isn't the sort of argument he's making—he talks about "spin" and stuff.