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It's a very common misconception by weaker players that the dice are
unfair to them or rigged. Why? The reason better players are better is
that they understand more about how to plan for various die rolls, so
more of their rolls will look "lucky" than those of a weaker player.
There is also the fact that except for *huge* skill differences in fairly
long matches, the better player needs some luck to win, just not as much
as the weaker player does.
There's more that adds to this effect. People inherently have a poor
instinct for what randomness looks like. A statistician can easily spot
people trying to fake random data if those doing the faking aren't
*very* savvy about randomness. Random die rolls are *expected* to be
quite unfair to one side or another for extended periods of time (a
number of long matches, say) at some point in a very long series of
matches (like 100+). Sequences like 4 or 5 doubles in a row are nowhere
near as uncommon as people think, and in fact a large number (say 10000)
of rolls that *never* contains 3 or 4 doubles in a row is very unusual,
and in fact could be a very strong indication that the dice are *not*
random. Unless you've studied something about randomness, you don't
know what randomness looks like and will be inclined to believe a lot of
things about what should be expected that just ain't so.
Third: There's a psychological tendency to remember and be pained by
horrid luck much more so than you remember and are pleasured by good
luck. There are a ton of psychological studies done on investing and
gambling that show this kind of thing. In backgammon in particular,
weak players are often not good at recognizing which rolls are actually
the luckiest, and are skewed toward believing the opponent luckier in
the same way we all think we are above average drivers.
For this reason, the number of people who believe online dice are rigged
is huge, even at servers where a great deal of attention is paid to
checking on the randomness of their dice with regularity. What's really
happening is that the players on that server are just a whole lot better
than the person is used to playing! If you've played backgammon against
friends and family only and neither you nor anyone in your circle has
read a lot of books or played in major tournaments, or with real money
players. etc., then you are unlikely be as good as the average player on
gamesgrid or FIBS unless you are a real savant.
Michael
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