Does a game need below-average players

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I am no mathematician, just a programmer and gamer who thought about this problem. I reckoned it's more relevant here than one of the gaming-SEs, as it's not really about any particular game, but "game" as an idea.

Consider a game (probably considered "fair") where you have one player as the winner and one player as the loser. Every player has a history of games he played which is used to calculate his "win percentage", that is e.g. played 523 games, won 312 --> 59.65%. There can be quite a large amount of players and games.

The thing that I wonder is: In a system like this, is it possible for ALL players of the game to have a win % over 50?

Rephrased: For every player above 50%, does there need to be a player that has the same amount of percentage below 50% to "balance" it?

Maybe this doesn't make a lot of sense or I am missing a simple solution, but I just can't wrap my head around the math of how to think about this...

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Let $N \geq 1$ be the number of played games, $P_1$ the number of games the first player won and $P_2$ the number of games the second player won.

As every game has a unique winner we have $P_1 + P_2 = N$. The percentage of games the first player won is given by $P_1/N$. Similarly the percentage of games the second player won is $P_2/N$. If we had $P_1/N > 0.5$ and $P_2/N > 0.5$ then $$ \frac{P_1}{N} + \frac{P_2}{N} > 0.5 + 0.5 = 1. $$ But we must have $$ \frac{P_1}{N} + \frac{P_2}{N} = \frac{P_1 + P_2}{N} = \frac{N}{N} = 1. $$ So this is not possible.

Notice that instead of just two players we could also look at $n$ players, $n \geq 2$, and still get the same result: Instead of just $P_1$ and $P_2$ we have $P_1, \dotsc, P_n$ with $P_1 + \dotsb + P_n = N$. If we then had $P_1/N > 1/n, \dotsc, P_n/N > 1/n$ then $$ \frac{P_1}{N} + \dotsb + \frac{P_n}{N} > \underbrace{\frac{1}{n} + \dotsb + \frac{1}{n}}_{n} = 1, $$ but we must have $$ \frac{P_1}{N} + \dotsb + \frac{P_n}{N} = \frac{P_1 + \dotsb + P_n}{N} = \frac{N}{N} = 1. $$

It is maybe interesting to notice that this only works if every game has at most one winner. If a game can have multiple winners then it could happen that every player has won more games than lost: Suppose for example that we have three players $A$, $B$ and $C$, and that $A$ and $B$ have won the first game, $B$ and $C$ have won the second game, and $A$ and $C$ have won the third, and final, game. Then every player has won $2$ out of $3$ games!

But of course in this case “more than average” does not longer mean having won more than one third of the games, but having won more than $2$ games, as everyone has won $2$ games on average.

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You can see the answer by considering one game at a time. After 1 game, you have 1 total win and 1 total loss, after 2 games you have 2 of each... after n games you have n wins and n losses total.

So no matter how you distribute wins and losses, the total is always equal. But if everyone had more wins than losses, the total would have more wins than loses which we just showed is impossible.

The only ways around this involve things like making it possible for everyone to win a game.