Thread: rush/anti rush
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Old 12-07-2005, 03:28 PM
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Default Re: rush/anti rush

"Rush" is a bad word to use. But streaks certainly do exist, and it's well within the limits of probability.

Just for fun, flip a quarter a few hundred times, and assume I pay you $1 for every heads and you pay me $.95 every time it lands tails (of course you like this proposition because it pays you an expected two-and-a-half cents per flip).

But occassionally that damn coin is going to land tails ten times in a row. Am I "rushing" during this multi-win $0.95 extravaganza? No, it's just raw statistics. And damn it, you won the next five, lost one, and won five more!

This is a stupid example, but I think it illustrates the point that what you perceive as good and bad runs, is just probability playing out its course. And in poker (as with all games of high variance), 2 sigma is pretty far from your expected value.

Oh, and try flipping that same quarter twenty times and getting the result H-T-H-T...H-T. I'm not going to calculate, but the probability is close to zero.
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