Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-36015663-20181018164003/@comment-35284508-20181023165250

People are just plain rotten at assessing randomness, myself included. There are the classic cases of people who are afraid to fly but not afraid of the drive to the airport. We can get addicted to the idea that we can "beat the system" some way. One of the most played computer games in history is the early PC solitaire. IBM introduced it along with a couple of other games in order to get people to practice using a mouse. Solitaire took off from the start it was easy it was fun and much better than digging out the card deck. But it wasnt the ease of one button reshuffle or redo that made it such a hit. It was because the game was rigged for you to win. The designers didnt use a random shuffle, they provided a preselected number of solvable games. I played the game for 15 years and didn't think to ask why I was much better at it than using real cards until some computer geeks (my heros) ran out the possibilities and published not only the number of games contained But that IBM messed up and included one game that couldn't be won.

We are so easy to fool that we become sure that we are better at things, ignore the losses or seek some additional variable that we hadn't accounted for when randomness goes against us. I have played long enough to know that every new update someone here is likely to complain that MT has changed the odds. Poor Amy Smith gets flooded with emails about being unfair and has probably been forced to get an unlisted phone number. If what I've seen is true the CI drop rate must have gone from 50% to 3% in my years in Darkwood. All without any attempt at proof.