by Snowball »
27 Apr 2021 11:21
Just think, first coin is a Head. Next toss is EXACTLY 50/50 to be a head again. If a head is "we had good luck" in Game 1, then we have exactly 50% chance of good luck in game 2, and so on. There is NOTHING in science or maths or statistics that says the universe has a hidden mechanism to make a tail more likely "to even things up" "because of the law of averages"
Humans have a lot of built in prejudices that are just plain WRONG. Punters lose a lot of money because of that. We say "Barnsley have won 6 on the trot, or 7, or 8 THEREFORE they are likely to draw or lose their next game "because runs of 9 wins "don't happen".
It's twaddle.
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Sides who played Reading when JOAO was on fire were (slightly) less lucky, surely?
Sides who got JOAO 2 had a big break.
Sunday, had Ayew's hammy strain been a little worse and he didn't come off the bench...
Were we not slightly unlucky to get Birmingham Mark 2 and suffer the new-manager bunch?
Every club will have a bell-curve of luck-in-games and they will all look SIMILAR but not identical. Again, by chance, one club's bell-curve might be more to the luck end then the unlucky one.
The idea that each club will have (say) 1 very unlucky game, 10 unlucky games, 24 neutral games, 10 lucky, one VERY lucky is just ridiculous. OF COURSE, in a season there will be sides who get "the rub of the green", and sides where (it seems) nothing goes right.
And, even if luck DID average out, sometimes luck might mean winning 3-1 instead of 2-1, whereas luck might mean a crucial 1-0 win in the PO Final. Not all luck or bad luck will matter the same.