[Captain_Usher]

The difference is whether the decision is based on where the money is today or where the money's been historically.

The board game analogy is pretty apt. In The Settlers of Catan, players compete to reach 10 Victory Points by developing a robust and healthy colony. Settlements are worth one VP each, and upgrading one to a city makes it worth two. The city also pays out double resources, and it's relatively difficult to stop a player from building cities. I might observe that players who win tend build all their settlements and upgrade as many of them into cities as possible, so I decide going into this game that's what I'll do. I decided on that strategy without actually taking this game's state into account, and I will probably not do very well if this game is unlike games I've seen before.

Alternately, I might just build whatever seems appropriate given the resources I'm getting. This is "playing the board." The strategy for this game is based on the current game's state, not general knowledge of the game's rules in a vacuum or observations of prior games.

If someone studies historical trends and concludes that people with skills related to broadly applicable inventions will get paid a lot, like people who can make steam engines or program computers, they're using the first strategy. They didn't look at today's conditions at all, they noted that life in general seems to cause good salaries and specific types of skills to coexist. If they instead just show up to their first day of college, look up the average starting salaries for recent graduates in every department, and join one with the highest number that they feel confident they can graduate from, they're using the second strategy. The end result could be identical and they wind up writing software either way, but the strategies were formed using totally different methods.

[CydeWeys]

Catan very much requires "playing to luck", and I wonder how that fits into the rest of the analogy. Sure, there's an optimal strategy, but because of the resource discard rules on rolled 7s (the most common roll, of course), you very often have to make the purchase that you can. It's either that or not make a purchase at all and lose out to the discard.

"Playing to luck" is different than "playing to the board" in my book because it requires making probabilistic decisions that have no place in, say, Chess.