Would it be suspicious to beat someone 63 games in a row?

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sorryimlikethis
Posts: 221
Joined: 16 September 2021, 13:04

Would it be suspicious to beat someone 63 games in a row?

Post by sorryimlikethis »

How much of For Sale is luck vs skill?

Say, hypothetically, I enjoy playing with my wife but there is a large skill gap between us. Would it be reasonable to finish above her in 63 consecutive games? Or would that be suspicious?

My dilemma is I would like to hold on to rank #1 but I'm not very good at the game by myself. Do you think I would get a warning if I played with my wife 157 times and beat her 85% of the time?
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Palapapa
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Joined: 17 June 2015, 15:29

Re: Would it be suspicious to beat someone 63 games in a row?

Post by Palapapa »

sorryimlikethis wrote: 28 June 2022, 09:48 Would it be reasonable to finish above her in 63 consecutive games?
no.
Even an opponent not knowing the rules and clicking randomly woud beat you a few times.
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RicardoRix
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Joined: 29 April 2012, 23:43

Re: Would it be suspicious to beat someone 63 games in a row?

Post by RicardoRix »

Feels like a leading question.

In theory, ELO calculation will get to a point that when you win you'll get a 15% increase, and when you lose you'll get a 85% decrease, so the net increase is 0.

For example, I've played my mum quite a lot at LITS, and I have about a 75% win rate. When I win I get about 5 points ELO and when I lose, I lose 15 ELO points. Net 0.

63 consectutive games at 85% is (0.85) ^ 63 = 35 in a million chance.... Sounds extremely unlikely.
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sorryimlikethis
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Joined: 16 September 2021, 13:04

Re: Would it be suspicious to beat someone 63 games in a row?

Post by sorryimlikethis »

RicardoRix wrote: 28 June 2022, 10:08 Feels like a leading question.

In theory, ELO calculation will get to a point that when you win you'll get a 15% increase, and when you lose you'll get a 85% decrease, so the net increase is 0.

For example, I've played my mum quite a lot at LITS, and I have about a 75% win rate. When I win I get about 5 points ELO and when I lose, I lose 15 ELO points. Net 0.

63 consectutive games at 85% is (0.85) ^ 63 = 35 in a million chance.... Sounds extremely unlikely.
Thank you for taking the time to reply and putting the odds into perspective. Thankfully the issue has now been resolved :)
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donkeykong66
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Joined: 08 July 2015, 11:39

Re: Would it be suspicious to beat someone 63 games in a row?

Post by donkeykong66 »

One thing to add to the 35 in a million chance added earlier is that this is for a specific run of 63 games. If you play 157 games then you have about 100 runs of 63 games that all could be that lucky run, so the expected number of such runs is about 35 in 10 thousand instead. Of course this is now not quite the probability of having a run of 63 games in a row (because a run of length 64 would contribute two runs), but the order of magnitude of getting at least 1 run of 63 wins should be more of the order of about 0.1%, which is small but definitely not unlikely.

This is similar to the following: tossing a coin and getting 15 heads in a row has a probability of about 1 in 30000, which is quite small (although somewhat reasonable). However, if you toss a coin 500 times in a row, you already have close to a 1% chance to get at least 1 streak of 15 heads somewhere among these 500 coin tosses (https://www.omnicalculator.com/statisti ... lip-streak).

In general, many events with a 1 in a million chance happen all the time, and it just happening once isn't usually a reason for concern. In fact, 1 in a million events SHOULD happen about 1 in a million times they're attempted / checked for. Would you get suspicious if you play a game of Yahtzee with someone, and they roll a yahtzee on their first roll of the game, and then another yahtzee on their first roll on the second move of their game? The odds of this happening are about 1 in a million, which is very low right? But now think of how many yahtzee games are played every single day all over the world. Eventually someone is going to get this lucky start, which doesn't mean they're cheating. Now if you play them again and they get the same lucky start, and then again when you play them tomorrow, that's when something suspicious is probably going on. But you can't look at something that has happened, calculate that the odds were 1 in a million and conclude that it was malicious.

The main issue and point of debate here would be the assumption that you can win 85% of your games against a certain opponent in the first place. Whether or not there is enough skill in For Sale to get that consistent of a win percentage against anyone seems unlikely, although I would assume that most people are playing multiplayer games, which are by definition a lot harder than control. If For Sale had a 2 player mode, in such a hypothetical situation I wouldn't be surprised if this is possible against someone that is not good at that game. In particular, I disagree, using a hypothetical random-button-clicker like Palapapa suggested, I think a well-versed player should be able to get a good win percentage (perhaps even above 85%) against such a player. Given that 3 players is the minimum, getting an 85% win-percentage against someone seems very hard (but maybe not impossible if you only play 3p?)
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