2.5 chance out of 6? What?
You can’t mathematically determine exactly how many games you win or lose because of luck, no matter how much you know about statistics. This is because it’s impossible to quantify the exact degree of luck vs. skill in any particular game.
Luck in certain battles is much more important than in others. It is possible to have overall better average luck than your opponent in a game, but yet still be the “unluckier one”. Maybe your opponent got a lucky roll when it really mattered.
Sometimes a lucky hit takes out an enemy battleship. Sometimes, just an extra infantry or two that will get slaughtered on a counter-attack anyway.
The comparative skill levels of the players has a lot to do with how many games are actually won and lost by luck. If you are very close to the same skill level, then luck is much bigger factor in who will win. If you are a lot better than your opponents, you’ll usually beat them whether you’re lucky or not.
JWW keeps saying he’s so surprised that some players can consistently win 80-90% of their games, even though there are so many dice throws.
But some players are just a lot better than most other players, so if a player is in the top 5-10% of players in skill level, we are seeing that those players also only lose about 5-10% of their games. Once in awhile maybe it’s because they screwed up or just actually got out-played. Some of those games, of course, they lost because their luck was so much worse than the other player’s. But we have players who only lose 10-20% of their games, consistently, year after year. This tells me that skill is a much bigger factor than luck in A&A.
Now that said, if two players are of the same exact skill level, dice will decide many if not most of those outcomes.
Two players of the same skill level will each win about half of the games when playing a game with no luck - chess. Why is this?
There are games with a lot of luck and not very much skill involved (Uno, for example?) that a more skilled player can still consistently win at.
I’ve played over a hundred games of chess in the past 2 years with lots of different kids ages 10-16. I never lost a game. Once I blundered and gave up my queen to one of the more skilled 16 year olds, but I recovered, took advantage of his over-confidence and came back to win. You can still lose a game of chess to someone much less skilled than you, but it will very rarely happen if you’re not careless.
I’ve also played dozens of rounds of Uno with young kids - ages 12 and 14. Of course, they win quite a few hands. But I win significantly more than my share, because my experience and skill wins me several hands.
A&A is somewhere in between Uno and Chess on the luck/skill ratio.
I believe it is impossible to quantify how many games you win or lose purely because of luck, for many reasons. One of the big ones is that the players probably have different levels of skill.
I have consistently won over 80% of the A&A games that I have played, for the past several years. :-)
I would estimate that more than half of the games I lost, I got out-played. So I think less than 10% of the games I’ve played, I lost because I had too much bad luck, or bad luck when it counted most. I’ve had many games where I had bad luck at critical times, but was able to recover because I was more skilled/experienced than my opponent, or my opponent got careless. Just like when I screwed up and lost my queen to the 16 year old.
Does that help with the question you often ask yourself, about how many wins/losses you attribute to pure luck?
I think that depends a lot on how skilled a player you are, and the skill of your competition.
