If you simply 12 pool every game, you will have a 100% chance of beating a cannon rush, but nobody will ever cannon rush you.
The real trick to beating a cannon rusher is to look like you are vulnerable to a cannon rush yet not being vulnerable at all, which allows you to collect their mmr. If you simply hard counter the cannon rush, they will stop doing it. You have to look vulnerable while being invulnerable. That’s why being able to beat a cannon rush is not the same thing as being able to beat a cannon rusher.
Beating the opponent requires a broader strategy which encompass the possibility he will change his strategy if you make it too obvious that you are countering it. Usually the limit to this is somewhere in the range of 60-70% win-rate. If you win more than ~70% of the time, they will stop using a build.
This behavior is observed in rats, by the way, so it’s more broadly applicable to life in general and even other species (probably all mammals). Rats will play wrestle and the larger rat will learn that if they don’t intentionally let the other rat win ~30% of the time then the smaller rat will stop playing.
SC2 players think they are so big-brained playing a “strategy” game without realizing their base-line rat-brain is in total control. That’s how you know that intelligence is layers of abstraction. The higher layers just provide more complex ways to produce the same goal of the lower layers. They take a more complex scenario and reduce it to “true or false, do I win at least 30% of the time?”.
This applies to any kind of social interaction, by the way. If you are selling a car and you simply rake the buyer over the coals, he will never buy from you again. Beating this game means you have to sell cars at a markup, but not so much of a markup that it’s obvious you are cheating them, and that means they will continue to buy from you. The way products achieve this is when the perceived value is decoupled from the cost to manufacture. So a person thinks a drill is worth $100 because it’s going to solve a problem in his life worth $200, but he doesn’t realize it costs $10 to make the drill and $5 to ship it to the store.
Free market mechanics keep the cost to manufacture and the perceived value fairly tightly correlated. This is because a businessman sees the two aren’t correlated for some market and that means he can insert his business into that market with a slightly lower price point and get a portion of the sales, making him filthy rich. Repeat this process over and over, and the perceived value quickly converges on the value of the materials + the labor to produce it, meaning the market is now in equilibrium and there is no money to be made. A good example of that is construction labor. The value of a home is pretty much the cost to manufacture it in parts and labor plus like 5-7%.
Innovation happens when you discover a new way to manufacture the same thing at a lower price point, or when you discover a way to manufacture a better thing at the same price point. An example of this happening is in the medical labor market. Software engineers are developing tools that drastically reduce the labor costs by making it easier for doctors to treat patients. Have you ever gone in to a doctor visit, you haven’t seen him in 5 years, and yet he remembers the things you talked about? That’s because he has software that allows him to store the medical history of his patients plus his own personal notes. In the past, the doctor would have no clue who you are or what your history is. It would be a clean-slate start-from-zero interaction, which means you’d probably have to make multiple visits to resolve a problem that could’ve been resolved in 1 visit if the doctor knew your history.
Business strategy is basically about finding a way to decouple the manufacturing cost from the perceived value. There are three main ways of doing this. One is to reduce the material cost. For example, you are manufacturing paint from fish oils and you find a new source of oil that is even cheaper. Second is to reduce the labor costs, which could mean making the process more efficient via tools, machinery, software etc. Third is by manipulating public perception i.e. gaslighting the public. A company may, for example, add air to the bags of chips or add padding to the bottoms of boxes making it seem like there is more there than there actually is (very common with gift chocolates, for example). Basically it’s all a way to disrupt the correlation between perceived value and manufacturing cost in a positive way. There is another strategy and it’s to create a negative correlation which means anyone who sells on that market is going to have a net loss, and that’s useful for hurting competition.
All of these strategies are analogous to SC2 because your goal when beating cannon rushers is to distort the perception of the value of cannon rushes, making the opponent think he’s about to collect a lot of mmr, when in reality you are going to be collecting his mmr. It’s all about manipulating the perception of the game state in ways to screw with your opponent’s brain.
TLDR rat brain mechanics are why billionaires exist and why cannon rushers are free mmr.