The player in the first game had an advantage and didn't trade 10's, then for some crazy reason left his 10 out there to the only piece approaching the 10. I played a ton of stratego as a young adult, and i would never have thought that was close to an optimal strategy.
What makes you think that? The article says that one of the coauthors used to be a world champion, which suggests to me that there is some kind of competitive organized league.
I think there are probably very much diminishing returns.
A small scene is probably pretty damn good at the top. Having hundreds of thousands of competitive players helps, but even with a small sample you are probably likely to get at least some very, very strong players.
It's hard to think of a relevant real world example, but a fun corollary I'm familiar with is Fedex (Federico Perez Ponsa). He is a full chess Grandmaster, #461 in the world in chess amongst ~300k active FIDE players. By your "International Masters study hard" logic, when you drop him into Age of Empires 2, a game with ~500 competitive tournament players, his work ethic should dominate. But it turns out that the top ~100 AoE2 players are really damn good and practice a ton (easily chess IM amounts), and Fedex tops out around ~#50 in the world.
No matter how good the top players are relative to the competition tho, I feel like a large playerbase still raises the skill bar to a huge degree. There's a ratchet effect where someone figures something out, other people copy, and it breaks into public consciousness through influencers and popularizers. Then on the tail end, regular people regurgitate it for years like it's new information. (Getting sick of hearing about cognitive biases and product-market fit and dunning kruger, ffs). I've seen it with dota over the last 10 years. Pro players were always good, but now bad players are good and pro players are better. Not to mention the motivation that comes from seeing other people work hard.
When it comes to stratego, watching the linked games (from an armchair!), the human players looked relatively sloppy. Overusing scouts in the early game, too eager to trade, noticed a piece being forgotten about once. Not to say I'd be better, but it definitely looks like the scene is "for fun" and not so serious.
I completely without knowledge on the topic would imagine the "for fun" aspect is probably a pretty dominant factor.
I play disc golf pretty regularly. Over the last 10 years, it has exploded in popularity.
I'm not sure that the explosion of popularity has resulted in better people performing in tournaments.
But what has changed, is how much money can be won by competing in disc golf, and how much money is available across the sport as a whole.
The increased prize money has dramatically changed the number of people and level of competition for people playing the game seriously as well as how seriously everyone involved in top level play takes the sport. This then has a trickle down effect in the number of people and seriousness of things like training clinics, professional teachers, professional and more intelligent course construction and analysis. It pays for more analysis into all aspects of gameplay to increase the competitive edge of performers at the top.
The increased player base, in turn, pays for most of this, as it increases the potential market for the same services as all of the above. And the more seriously top level play is, and the higher the winning prize pool money goes, the more respectable the sport has become in the public eye, which in turn creates a catch-22 effect whereby players appear more willing to spend more money on the sport on those services.
All of which increases the level of play at the top. And you can see it in the quality of new young athletes that are coming up in this new environment, and how much better they are and how much more they are able to learn from the more widely accessible resources than their equivalent counter-parts were 10 years ago.
Its been fascinating to watch, and very exciting. Particularly over the pandemic, the sport has come from being called "frolf" on a golf course or in your local park, to "disc golf" with multi-million dollar professional contracts, dedicated disc golf resorts and private courses, training clinics, and dedicated PPV channels. Very cool : D
A counter-example might be the various competitive communities around different forms of boardgames, which tend to be very small, but often very competitively driven and taken very seriously by a very dedicated community, but I don't know enough about the topic to discuss : )
That type of logic is unsafe - we don't know that Ponsa is playing AoE with the same intensity as chess.
In fact, the idea that someone can train with sufficient intensity to be a high ranking chess master then break in to the top 50 of AoE at the same time suggests a lower skill saturation in the AoE world.
