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BGonline.org Forums
The meaninglessness of money-game sessions
Posted By: Timothy Chow
Date: Wednesday, 27 June 2012, at 9:03 p.m.
Falafel came full circle, suggesting a heads-up live money session between Stick and David Wells, which was the original suggestion I made that triggered this whole soap opera.
It sounds like such a session won't happen, which is a shame. However, I figured that it's worth posting the following simple calculation, since (as Stick has said) it seems that many people don't appreciate how "meaningless" backgammon results are.
Suppose that Stick plays a 2.3 and David plays a 2.7. I'll assume that these are Snowie ER's since that makes the calculation simpler, even though I think these figures (which I'm stealing from David's post) are PR's.
Suppose next that each move takes a player 10 seconds on average. This might seem slow, but both David and Stick agree that Stick plays slowly in order to minimize oversights. I'm also factoring in the "dead time" between games (toilet breaks, setting up checkers, whatever).
Stick's advantage is 0.4 millipoints per move. That means after ten hours of play, Stick can expect to be—wait for it—a whopping 0.72 points ahead. That's right, after ten hours, Stick's average net profit will be less than one point. If they played for $100 a point, then Stick would expect to make less than if he were working for minimum wage (which is $7.70/hour in Ohio).
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