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BGonline.org Forums
Luck vs. Skill
Posted By: trichard
Date: Friday, 5 December 2008, at 10:44 p.m.
I have long thought that there's too much luck in backgammon. With this in mind, I recently suggested that the game would be better if doubles resulted in only 2 moves instead of 4. This was shot down (as I recall, no one agreed with this proposal), so I'm not going to beat that dead horse. Still, I'm curious to what extent luck outweighs skill. To start with, let's look at a single game. Assume two players of approximately equal ability - one makes errors in the game totaling .06 and the other .03 (if these figures are unrealistic, just assume a difference of .03 at any level you choose). On average, the game will end when one player has an equity of .57. So .03 vs. .57 would mean that in this single game, luck was about 20 times more important than the difference in skill.
Have I done something stupid here?
Perhaps one of you proficient in mathematics could calculate the odds of the lesser player winning an 11 or 13 point match if they both played to these error rates. If a difference of .03 isn't representative of a typical tournament match at the higher skill levels, supply your own assumption.
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