Cowboys in westerns always have standoffs because the one who draws first attempts murder, to draw second is justified self-defense
Everyone is armed all the time and that's normal, but to draw a weapon is an overt hostile act. A standoff therefore is a game of chicken because both want to kill each other and you want to draw first to have the highest chance of surviving, but even a bandit will hesitate to add a felony murder charge to their rap sheet. The whole town serves as witness when there is a pair of eyes behind every shuttered window. The hero always draws second, both demonstrating his superior skill and speed by defeating the opponent even at a disadvantage, and getting away with murder scot-free.
So what does this mean for Western gunslingers? Is it always better to draw second? Well, not quite. Welchman also found that the 21 millisecond benefit of reacting quickly was totally overwhelmed by the 200 milliseconds it took to react in the first place.
Of course, ethics committees might frown on scientists duelling with the pistols in the name of discovery, even if the people in question were graduate students.
eSports FPS players know this very well - it's better to be the one reacting than the one peeking a corner, even if both expect the other and aim roughly at where the other might be in advance
In eSport where the only physical movement is a couple mm of their hand that may be true. In the physical world where these things involve several inches or more of movement with large muscle groups...ehhh no.
Gunfighter hypotheticals aside you can watch it play out in the real world during any soccer game. The attacker who makes the defender react to them slips past while the defender who makes the attacker react wins. The attacker who makes the goalie react has an open net, but if the goalie can make the attacker react then they block the shot (or it misses).
No matter the physical sport, Soccer, Basketball, Rugby, Volleyball, if it has 1 v 1 elements then "juking" works and the reason why is because it makes the other player reactive.
This lacks a lot of context as both strategies are useful in different circumstances. For a player (A) holding an angle from a far distance, this is true because the person coming around the corner (B) from a short distance to the corner is visible to to A before A is visible to B. This gives the reactor an advantage. This is usually afaik called angle advantage
For a person who is close to a corner peeking a person close to the corner, the opposite can be true due to the delay it takes for the movement to be relayed to the other player's computer. This means that the player peeking may in more extreme cases have a 100-200ms advantage over the reacting player. This is dubbed peeker's advantage.
Yeah, nah. A standoff looks cool, adds tension, gives the goodie and baddie time to talk or to be silent (menacingly). But apparently they weren't used much irl. From Wikipedia:
That's what I used to think as a kid - westerns standoffs are an outgrowth of Old World duels, a formalized custom performed by traditionalists, even the baddest bandit secretly being a gentleman at heart. The showerthought here is that the order of events is also perfectly explained by taking legal considerations of justified self-defense into account.