I feel one of the requirements of owning eXtreme Gammon is to complain about the dice. LOL

But I do have a serious question.

Will a inferior human player have more bad luck over a superior opponent because he is opening himself up to more bad luck rolls?

I've been thinking about my play (which is Low advanced at the moment) and how in 30+ games I have "bad luck" about 75% of the time. Is this actually normal?

I'm not complaining - with hundreds of thousands of poker hands I know about randomness and how there is always something you have never seen before and how a bad poker player will have more bad luck because of how he plays.

Same with backgammon?

Yes.

From the perception point I would say yes (the game is all about that the forthcoming dice can be played better. As a worse player you don't see you're moves are bad) but from the math I would say no.

"Luck is a mystical illusion which does not exist in reality."
- from the wonderful book Poker: A Guaranteed Income For Life.

"There is no such thing as luck."
- Obi Wan Kenobi (Star Wars)

How do you define luck?

If you miss hitting an opponent's blot, which would have won the game for you had you not missed it, is that bad luck? What if you, on the prior roll, blundered, because the play that should have been made, that you missed, would have greatly improved your chances of hitting that blot on subsequent rolls? Now is it bad luck that you missed that blot, or was it simply your bad play a move earlier?

One can say that an inferior human player has more bad luck, but bad players often make plays which simply restrict the number of good rolls available later. Over time, everyone will have the same "luck."

"Backgammon is a deceptive game. Players of all levels invariably underestimate its profundity; it is a complex game of tactics and strategy. On every roll, a decision must be made, and the cumulative weight of these decisions is a vital factor in winning."
- Paul Magriel

Luck in backgammon can be quantified (and programs like gnubg and Snowie use this method to do so). Each position has an equity. This equity is simply the average value of the position, calculated by multiplying your probability of each possible result by the value of that result, 3x bg win pct, 2x gammon win pct, etc., and adding those values. This equity is the average equity of the positions resulting from each of the 36 possible rolls.

Once you roll a specific roll, your equity (usually) changes. It could increase or decrease depending on the roll. The difference between the equity you had before rolling and after rolling is the luck value for that roll. The programs will average these individual roll luck values to produce a luck rating for a game, session or match.

The luck rating calculated by this method does not depend on your skill level. The equity values used are the theoretical optimal equities, the equities that would result from playing out the remainder of the game optimally. If you blunder, your equity will end up lower than the theoretical equity (that’s what “blunder” means), but it won’t affect the luck calculation. Just as a simple example, the starting position has equity of zero. If you win the opening roll with a 31, your theoretical equity jumps to some higher value that I don’t recall right now, but let’s say 0.15 (someone can correct this if I’m way off). That zero equity was the average of the equities of all possible rolls, both with you winning and losing the opening roll. Your luck in this case would be 0.15. If for some reason, you used that 31 to do anything but make your 5 point, you would not have 0.15 equity, but your luck rating still would be 0.15.

The luck rating this calculated should tend toward zero as the number of rolls increases. However a game or a match certainly is not enough rolls that it could not be either very positive (lucky) or negative (unlucky).

PLEASE believe me I'm not complaining at all. BUT -WOW so many IN MY MIND - WTF moments aaaaghh!!

All I know is that I have played the last 5 games with a < 4.51 PR against the Champ and have gottin VERY UnLucky in 3 of them LOL OH - It's personal now! :-) (insert evil laugh)

In the 32 games I have played averaging about 11.00 PR, 22 had had "bad luck" which got me thinking about what caused luck in the first place and if I COULD expect it to even out over time.

Thanks everyone.

For every point where you had one of those moments when you thought you were unlucky, remember your opponent got lucky.