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BGonline.org Forums
Bad news from Belgium
Posted By: Joe Russell In Response To: Bad news from Belgium (Daniel Murphy)
Date: Friday, 8 October 2010, at 9:22 p.m.
'But the bottom line is that it cannot be proven that backgammon is a luck-free game.'
How many sports are devoid of luck? The amount of luck in tournament-backgammon may be more similar to tournament-bridge, tournament-gin, or tournament-poker than soccer, but there is luck in most sports and quite often a sporting event is decided by luck.
The best teams in baseball only win ~60% of their games and the worst teams only lose ~60%. The best tournament-backgammon players win ~60% of their games and the worst ~40%. There is a lot of randomness in baseball. There are statistics that track how well a player or pitcher is performing if you remove the luck element. One is called called BABIP-batting average on balls in play. It can be shown that most players, with small deviations, can be expected to have a batting average that is a percentage of the balls they put into play. Players that have been 'unlucky' and had fewer hits than expected, based on the number of balls they have put into play, will likely see improvement in future at-bats and vice versa. For pitchers there is a statistic called the EERA, or the expected earned run average. Again, it is an effort to determine how well a pitcher has performed after removing the 'luck' element.
When the best team plays the worst team in baseball, on paper, the weaker team should never win. In reality, the weaker team wins ~25 to 30% of the time. Usually this occurs because their players outperformed the other team on that given day, but often it is because they were 'lucky' a few of the balls they hit were just out of reach of opposing fielders while the better team was was unlucky to have hit too many balls right at the opposing fielders.
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