CHEATING or skewed Game Engine? Need a Statistician!

My math (I think was correct) in predicting that one team would have an advantage in six straight series would be 64 to 1. What was then presented was the chances of the AMOUNT of advantage. This is beyond my math ability but let us assume 1.6 results in a 1000. We play 100`s of thousands of game.So assuming 100,000 that is 16 managers that have suffered this misfortune. Again, while rare, with the sheer amount of play things are going to happen.

Interesting data. I've never looked that up for my own teams.

I haven't looked at the roll breakdown game by game, but I can tell you that of my last 14 playoff teams, I have been home team 11 times in the semis and have only advanced to the finals 3 of those times. That takes some kind of special rolling.

Home field advantage my ass ...

Muadib1950 - Did any of the unfavorable rolls occur when your pitcher was at a rating other than F9?

Also - could you provide a link to the series in question? Thanks.

In my last 29 play-off appearances I have lost in the first round 23 times advanced to the finals 6 times and won only 3 rings. NOW THAT REALLY SUCKS ! Bill

When I read this, I was thinking the same as Boyer. I believe pitcher fatigue affects the probability of rolls on the pitcher's card.
I also remember hearing that the game gives the home team a slight bonus. Maybe that's accomplished through a die weight factor hidden in the engine.
I don't think it is just as simple as calculating how many rolls were on each player's cards.

I wonder how many of you have an extensive history with dice and card leagues?

Great thought Steve. I wonder about that as well. If you have rolled the dice enough over the years, you will have seen every possible crazy outcome, just like in the online game.

All of the small sample size complaints about rolls and stats aren't reasonable in my opinion, and the conspiracy theories are downright ridiculous.

I believe that the HFA is just to subtract 1 from the split for the visiting team's ballpark singles. But I'm not sure.

You surely can't call any flaws in the dice rolling to be cheating, unless you are so paranoid that you believe that SOM is singling YOU out for mistreatment.

The programming was done by a guy named Bob Winberry. I'm not sure if he's still there or not. It's likely that they have jut used a rather poor pseudo-random number generator for the dice, since the first computer game was for the 8086 chip, which wasn't very powerful.

The odds of a typical game of 80 or so dice rolls coming out exactly equally are very small, probably less than 1%. Anything less than about 57% of the dice rolls going to one team is pretty normal. So a game where one team has 7 or 8 more favorable rolls than the other (that would be 44-36 rolls, or 55% to 45%) is nothing terribly odd.

You can bias the percentage of rolls that you get against you by hitting and running or bunting a lot, since I don't think it counts those events as rolling "on the batter's card."

There are dozens of things that you can do that have far more effect on the performance of your team than the dice do. Fix those, and you won't have so much to feel angry about. I see new players, time after time, drop a player who is hitting under .200 after a half dozen series. In about 1% of the cases, that works; the rest of the time it just makes things worse. If your team is off to a slow start, it's better to fiddle with your bullpen management and your team strategy settings to see if that can make things better. The bullpen settings that work for one team my be horrible for another.

I like how math is now called a conspiracy theory and not understanding how dice work. Once you have at least 200 items to study statistics are very valid. If you see a pattern develop that has a 1 in 700 chance of occurring and people try to tell you that happens all the time, the answer is simple. No it happens once in 700 times, you file that away and if you are consistently seeing items happen that fall against you that should occur 1 in 700 times either you are the unluckiest person on earth or the rolls are not normalized.

Let's take a simple example how many times should your opponents eighth inning begin with a roll on the hitter's card and then continue the streak on the hitter's card. These are usually very negative because this frequently will come against your very best late inning pitcher who is most favorable. If you see 8 straight rolls on the hitters card that should happen about once every other season. To get 14 straight rolls against you in the eighth inning you will see once in about 700 seasons. In other words the average stratomatic player should never see it, maybe one person one time might have something so unfortunate. That is the odds of what occurred happened, it is simple math about the likelihood and some of our more fortunate players knowing the programmer and how the code is working is not comforting nor does it change basic math.

2.00 1.00 81.00
4.00 2.00 40.50
8.00 3.00 20.25
16.00 4.00 10.13
32.00 5.00 5.06
64.00 6.00 2.53
128.00 7.00 1.27
256.00 8.00 0.63
512.00 9.00 0.32
1,024.00 10.00 0.16
2,048.00 11.00 0.08
4,096.00 12.00 0.04
8,192.00 13.00 0.02
16,384.00 14.00 0.01

Just clearing up some misinformation on previous posts on this thread regarding home field advantage.

Maximum rule: Home field advantage

This option forces a statistical advantage of approximately 10 points (.010) on the batting average for the home team. This is the traditional major league difference between batting averages at home and on the road.

Given the grossly inflated ballpark effects, I have long argued to shut off this particular maximum rule. However, many in the community also appear to like this feature being on. And of course they are entitled to their stupid opinions.

No reason to assume SOM is somehow cheating the customers with skewed die results. If nothing else, that would require too much effort on their part.

Given Mr. Richman's paranoia about competitors stealing his ideas, I'm pretty sure there are a lot of other black box elements to HAL that remain undisclosed to the community. Perhaps someone with close ties to Garcia can try to pry some of that information out of him. But I wouldn't be at all surprised if he doesn't know all of what is hidden in the game engine and even if he did, I wouldn't put it past Richman to make all SOM employees sign some sort of non-disclosure agreement.

There's no way any of this would be intentional. Computer glitch if anything. Is there a cost effective way to tweak or re-program? It's a well known fact that Strat-o-matic board game participants as a group are bestowed with a much higher intelligence than the general populace. A high percentage of mathematicians, statisticians, college professors, and MLB players and employees have blessed this divine entity game for decades. Having said this, I have a better question for the online game: Is there ever an instance when a team could be successful spending 50 percent of its ATG $80 12 team budget on pitching?