I met a friend with whom i play backgammon lately. In his opinion backgammon is a matter of the dice. As a backgammon fan i do my best to refute it, which generally speaking is no big deal. The difference is greater than that between expert and beginner. He is the type of player that will never dive into theory and after years of play hardly learns from his mistakes. He is capable of making the worst moves literally, and subsequently asking for confirmation of his great play. Usually i win 10 games in a row. Yesterday was different. He threw several jokers, whereas i could't enter, so it was he who won three games in a row.
The phenomenon of hot an cold run is very familiar to poker players, and less to the more scientific minded backgammon player. Luck and bad luck seems sometimes to come in bundles, a thing that is to me and many others a reality. (Excuse me for the sin of not owing it to the psychological dip, moderator). This doesn't imply that probability thinking is of little value. Over a million times we will throw double six still 1/36 of the time, but in a mysterious way it could sometimes be related to the next and/or previous throws. Let's refer it to omnipresence of whatever
So now the question is how to deal with it. It seems the phenomenon can be of short duration or very long duration (years, with some fluctuations). It seems sensible to quit or take a break if you sense you are in a cold run, and vice versa in a hot run. Maybe you should also take less risks in a cold run, and vice versa. I am curious about opinions.

If this is true, you need to get new dice.

Well, it takes a lot of courage to make a fool of myself. And in fact i am making a fool of myself. If you want to believe in a true cold run, it seems better to blame some subconscious force.
But i fear i won't be able to acquire any status at this forum in the future.

Don’t worry about that. You have probably already seen some of the foolish things I have posted!

Statistical fluctuations exist, but they are not caused by subconscious forces. They are just random variations. If you toss a fair coin a million times, you expect, with a high degree of confidence, to approach 50% heads/50% tails. Along the way, however, you will have many runs. You’ll have 10 heads in a row, and then 20 tails in a row, and so on. Statisticians can even perform tests, called chi-square tests, to make sure that the expected number of runs of each given length is occurring.

I would say you’re stuck in a run, but not in a rut!

In practice, money management is about the only thing you can do about a run of losses. Take a break. Don’t steam. When you come back, perhaps your luck will have changed. Statistically, you can expect that it will. But statistically, you can also expect that for 1 person in a zillion (or whatever) the bad luck streak will last for decades.

I hope you’re not the one!

Thanks a lot anyway, taper_mike. It's all very good intention, but i do know about statistical math. The thing is only, that i find that it happens much more often than would be statistically justifiable. In poker the phenomenon of cluttering luck is maybe more recognizable. Doyle Brunson even based largely his play upon it. When he mentioned it, and got the scorn from the rationalists, his reply was that he earned the millions, and not they.

Playing streaks well has no grounding in statistics, but it has a huge grounding in psychology, dominance and tilt control.

Everyone's, and I mean everyone's play drops a level or two during prolonged losing streaks. Great players are masters at minimising this damage, taking frequent breaks to regain control, and recognising the subtle signs of tilt as the monkey starts taking over and acting upon it. Conversely, bad players on losing streaks start losing way below their regular win/loss rate, making their losing streaks much longer and more severe as their drop in play soon overtakes any short term variance.

On the flip side, weak players often quit after small wins, reasoning that they have a nice win, want to protect it and have other things to do. Great players use small wins as springboards to completely dominate opponents, playing long sessions full of confidence and invariably with a big stack/lead to keep the pressure up for as long as possible. This allows them to often play above their regular win rate for long periods, as confidence and creatity exudes, making them utterly deadly.

You don'y quit during losing streaks to change statistics somehow - you quit to get your head right and make sure that you don't drop to the point where your edge evaporates and your losing streak continues until you go broke no matter how the dice or cards fall.

Despite everything i like to refer to the chinese triad of earth, human, heaven. In the earth domain there is the probability of succession, in the human domain the drop in clarity due to tilt, in the heavenly domain there is the principle of like attracting like.
You have to be patient, the proof will come later.

I believe your run has a lot to do with your mood. I had a really bad day yesterday in my business losing a major client through no fault of my own. So last night in the chouette I just seemed to lose every no contact race by my opponent rolling several large doubles in a row. I started focusing more on attacking than I normally do (and I usually attack a lot) and so there were less no contact races and gradually turned my -ve score into a +ve score. But at the time I thought I was already playing well but mood affects you abiility to think clearly.

I'm still fairly new to Backgammon, and getting used to the dice factor was probably the biggest challenge in the first couple weeks. Just very hot and cold, and bouncing around between extreme confidence and extreme annoyance. I'm not usually playing or studying games that have the short-term element of luck (my lifestyle game is Go), so that took some getting used to.

I think Grant's point is excellent. If your mood is bad, negative thoughts are more pronounced and it's much easier to focus on what goes wrong. When you're in a good mood, it's easier to shrug stuff off and be more relaxed about it all. If you want to look at it spiritually (as you already have!), then yes, like attracts like, and if you are grumpy and frustrated, it's pretty hard to feel good.

I think those dice offer a good opportunity to get better at dealing with uncertainty and unpredictable circumstances, and teach to accept the uncontrollable and make the best out of whatever happens. But hey, that may just be those years of playing Go that taught me to make connections and see pattern even where there might be none.

There is a lot of great advice in this thread, and Miva is giving us a little bit here.

The players I respect the most are able to stay in the moment, and no matter how dire the circumstance, seek out the best play (or cube action) for the given roll, position, score and opponent.

If you can do that, the dice and the scoresheet will take care of themselves.

i wouldn't be surprised if there is some acausal relationship between mood and cold and hot run. i rather would deny this topic, because i have a gifted mathematical mind, and believing that there is something supernatural in gambling takes away from the intellectual challenge.
it is like paranormal phenomena. most people have encountered something in their lifes, but not everyone dares to admit. but it is an idea that enriches life on a whole.
on the most fundamental level of physics, so also life, one meets the paradoxical, not the and/or, but the and/and. so my belief is that statistics holds true, and can at the same time bundle in bad or good luck. it is insane, but that is how i and many more people are experiencing it.
most of you know that probability law is inexplicable and irrational in itself.

Forget all the mumbo-jumbo.

Work hard, study hard, concentrate when you play, make good moves, and your results will get steadily better over time. That's all there is to backgammon in a nutshell. You can think about hot streaks, cold streaks, the paradoxical, the paranormal, and the irrational all you want and your play won't improve by an iota.

i did so, mr. Robertie. don't draw the conclusion that i am a frustrated player who wants more than is within his reach. i know your books, i have studied -modern backgammon-, the best book about backgammon (which should actually not be advertized). i agree to your post, but at the same time one should not be too dogmatic, that is , i rather think a little bit in terms of and/and. (that's also your inclination, in the light of your first chapter of 501 and balance risk and reward by middling plays).
i thought this way before i had heard of Doyle Brunson, whom i think will be respected by Dan Harrington.

Last month I played a lot of Sit And Goes. I played very well like Expert or World Class player (all games i checked by GNU) . But every time some f*cking lucky roll of opponents ruined all my game. Every time same sh*t happened: unlucky roll of mine and very lucky roll of opponent. I loose dozen games in a row. But after it I played like an amateur some stupid errors and bad movements. But I won the tournament. And it made me crazy and pissed off. )))

There is a fundamental difference between cold rush and poker/backgammon site fraud. Did you play online?

Yes, I played online.

Two weeks ago a neighbour (not the guinee pig one) kicked in my (double) window. I was playing poker, he was drunk, and i didn't allow him to enter and join. For 10 years he's been playing internetpoker, sometimes night and day. He never really won something, and spent a huge amount of time. His obsession and frustration with poker is big. He damns the poker sites, and says they are rigged. Ofcourse i went to the police, and they confirmed it. And in case they are not knowledgeable, there are accounts on youtube which are convincing.
The sites make use of human accomplices and robotic players, and let you sometimes win a little bit for encouragement.
For backgammon the same story holds true. This is huge business. I suppose they are in criminal hands, so respect to mr. Robertie for denouncing the thing.

This is a duplication of a message of a former topic:
Two weeks ago a neighbour (not the guinee pig one) kicked in my (double) window. I was playing poker, he was drunk, and i didn't allow him to enter and join. For 10 years he's been playing internetpoker, sometimes night and day. He never really won something, and spent a huge amount of time. His obsession and frustration with poker is big. He damns the poker sites, and says they are rigged. Ofcourse i went to the police, and they confirmed it. And in case they are not knowledgeable, there are accounts on youtube which are convincing.
The sites make use of human accomplices and robotic players, and let you sometimes win a little bit for encouragement.
For backgammon the same story holds true. This is huge business. I suppose they are in criminal hands, so respect to mr. Robertie for denouncing the thing.

The question is, whether online backgammon is of any use, as it is no big deal to play it live. It is much more a homegame than poker, and in cities anyway you will find pubs where it is played.
Poker is a different thing. It is much less easy to organise. It may attract more criminal atmospheres. Body signs are very valuable, favouring bourkas and sociopaths. So there is something to say for online poker. But how can the reliability of a poker site be checked.
With the present situation there seems to me to be one option, and that is to play with people you do know, and of whom you are also sure they are not affiliated.
But i do have a suggestion for a better world. A poker site should be establised based on open source applications, which will get the okay from official side, so according to the Linux idea. And the profits should go to Taper_Mike, who knows best how to direct the money stream.

I think there's a reason this topic is referred to as a 'former' topic.

My ways are unfathomable

I lost 17 straight games to a professional gambler. At game 11 i noticed he was picking up the dice in his palm and then dropping them back down without shaking. The dice were flat and they barely seemed to roll if at all. I made him get cups and he put the dice in the cups but didnt shake it. He won 6 more games in a row. Am I paranoid? Even if I only had a 20% chance each game losing 17 games in a row is less than 2%. What do you think?

if it is true what you are telling, only a magic mind could juggle the dice in a favourable position. by the way, i know a professional backgammon player who shakes the cup passionately if the stakes get high. i used to get annoyed, and not without reason.

No, you're not paranoid. A dice cheat can easily manipulate large, flat dice to get the numbers he needs a high percentage of the time. I've seen it done. Get small, rounded corner dice and insist on using a cup. Your friend will lose interest quickly, but at least you won't lose money.