Sort of predictable dice after robber

[Samba12345678]

Hi,

I play quite a lot of Catan arena matches.
1 thing I noticed is that when you place a robber at a certain number in more than 30% ov the cases the dice come immediately at that certain number.
Do more people experience this?

[Romain672]

Humain brain is great to see patterns when there is none.

If someone block your 9 and you roll 9, you will remember it.
If someone block your 9 and 9 is never rolled after, you will not remember it.

We got that feeling too when playing Catan IRL years ago.


Start to do stats and note in a document/paper every time that happen or not. Do it 100 times. That will never be more than 30%. That's less than 14% in average, so even 20% is unlikely and would be weird.

[Samba12345678]

Yeah, i am aware of what you saying about human brain but I am quite sure that this really is a pattern

[Panadio]

Yes, that's true, I've noticed that too.

[Romain672]

Yeah, i am aware of what you saying about human brain but I am quite sure that this really is a pattern

Really a lot of claims like that one on the forum has been done.
And if you check the numbers, they are extremely rarely right. 99% of cases are just people missunderstood probability/people which got (un)lucky before their forum posts.

Even if other people back you up on that, that said nothing since most people would be biaised.

[euklid314]

Sorry to say: Dice posts that solely rely on "feeling" have been proven to be always wrong.

I analyzed only the last 2 games of Samba12345678, namely #794731443 and #794717589, respectively.

The ratio is 13:3 in the first game and 12:1 in the last game, i.e. 25:4 in both games combined.

Out of 29 situations where the robber was moved (by 7s or Knight cards), only 4 times the blocked number was rolled afterwards. This is a 13.8% occurrence.

Unless Samba (or anybody else) provides us a series of at least 10 consecutive games where the percentage is above 30% we can end the discussion. Since the claim is 30%, there should be many such sequences and it should not really take a long time to find such a sequence.

Warning: The argument that the claim is still true because one can simply "feel" it but one just dont want to bother with counting the numbers is rather weak.

[Jellby]

To connect with another unrelated thread, I believe this is most effectively proved by asking ChatGPT

[Samba12345678]

Tnx for the check on my games!! Quality I didn't expect.
I will remain silent (till I can prove otherwise:))

[euklid314]

Tnx for the check on my games!! Quality I didn't expect.
I will remain silent (till I can prove otherwise:))

I respect the attitude! Of course if I get statistical data that seem to show something wrong I will invest even more time for my analysis (2 games is only an indication but no evidence).

If proven wrong I will stand corrected - but it has never happened in comparable cases. The human biases are just too strong and it is virtually impossible to guess the percentages correctly without actually crunching numbers....

[aloof-rabbit]

Your comment gave away what is actually happening. You "notice". not that it is statistically happening more frequently, only you "notice" it.

If you were asked what number rolled 4 rolls back you likely couldn't remember without looking. But when the robber is on the tile that then blocked you and/or the tile of the resource you need then yeah you notice and send remember it easily.