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BGonline.org Forums
about those doubles
Posted By: Phil Simborg In Response To: about those doubles (scotty)
Date: Thursday, 30 April 2015, at 9:04 a.m.
Scotty said: "If the bot analysis on luck is to be taken at face value, then luck becomes a bigger factor as the skill level of the players increases."
While I like and agree with most of what you said, I am not sure I understand or agree with this statement.
I believe that the closer in skill the two players, the more luck becomes a factor. I don't believe, for example, if you take a 3.5PR player against a 4.5PR player that luck will decide more games than when a 7PR player plays an 8PR player.
I also don't believe the luck factor as stated by the bot tells the whole story of luck. It does tell, pretty well I believe, how much luck was gained by getting better dice than your opponent, or better or worse dice than "average" dice. But what it does not tell is how lucky or unlucky a player was to be presented with more difficult rolls or more difficult cube decision. And that is something that I doubt the bots will ever be able to measure accurately, because one player's "difficult" may not be the same an another player's, and I don't think the bot can know how to measure the difficulty of the decision.
Of course it may be able to measure how many close decisions one player has over another, but that, to me, is trivial, because if you have a close decision then the second-best play isn't going to hurt your outcome that much. A truly "difficult" decision is one where it is quite difficult for humans to find the right play or cube action and there is a significant difference between the best decision and the next-best decision.
Ask yourself why someone who averages, say, 4.5 PR suddenly has a game where he plays at 2 PR, or a game where he plays at 9 PR. What caused him to play so well one game and so poorly the next? I believe that most of the time it is because of the difficulty of the decisions he had to make, as well as being presented with positions that were either pretty much inside or outside of his particular knowledge base. To me, that is the luck factor that will make the biggest difference in the outcome of the match, not what is on the dice.
And this is just one more reason NOT to focus on doubles, or the luck factor at all. Every minute you spend researching and thinking about luck takes you away from channeling your mind, time, and resources toward resolving the holes in your game that contribute to losing that you can do something about.
In my duel with Mochy, he had a +16 luck factor. Of course that contributed to my loss greatly, and I could just say I was unlucky and hope that next time I won't be so unlucky. But how will that help me? What will help me, and what I am doing, is studying my errors and looking for holes and trends. Clearly there was one trend I can immediately improve: I held the cube too much...I missed too many doubles. Why? Because I started with the cube and I knew that I had to be better to give an initial recube than an initial cube, and I adjusted too much.
Had I given more cubes that I should have given, would I have won instead of lost? Who knows. Even with a +16 luck factor it's possible I could have won, and who knows how the luck factor would have been different if the cube was on the other side? It's not worth the time to try to figure that out, but it is worth my time to improve my recube action when I play Mochy next time, or someone else next time.
Mochy and I are planning a rematch, and I bet that I will make fewer errors holding the cube next time, and that will give me a better chance to win. That is the way to improve, not by counting how many doubles were rolled or what the luck factor was. And of course, the cube was not my only error...but it was the most consistent one. I am also looking at and studying my other errors, ah, but there is only so much time in the day and so many errors!
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