I Need An Odds-Maker

[Chicagoplayer]

It seems to me that in all my years of tournament participation and watching players who are from the same country or even road partners, wind up playing each other far more often than not in the early rounds, when the odds would seem to favour a more random draw.

I’ve seen it happen often, and I’ve had it happen to me more often than pure chance would have it.

Have you ever seen a situation like this?
Example:
Bustamante & Efren enter a tournament and immediately, they’re playing against each other.

I just saw Appleton v’s Sanderson happen in the first round.

I just saw 2 Taiwanese ladies players, travel 9,500 miles to San Juan, Puerto Rico to end up playing each other in the first round.

I know that a lot hinges on the number of players competing, but what are the odds?

 

[hang-the-9]

I have never stated ANYTHING for the entire tournament. I‘ve stated for round 1 , round 2 tops. It has moving variables. Unless you give me exact specifics.

It's not what you said it was, it was what your number indicated. The number you came up with is not for the chances of two players playing each other in the first round, it's the total possible match ups for the tournament in all the positions. 4032 is not the chance of two players playing each other, it's how many different combinations of matches you can have if you do a clean draw over and over.

"Zerksies said:
That's pretty easy math.

It's the player filed multiplied times the player field minus one. In a 64 player field it would be 64 x 63 players.

You have a possibility of 4032 combination of matches"

 

[hang-the-9]

I seem to recall hearing a lecture or interview with a stats professor.

He said one of things he'd do is separate a class into two groups. One group would be tasked with flipping a coin 100 times and recording the results. The other group was told to create an imagined sequence of a coin being flipped 100 times. He asked them to do this several times and to post their results on a chalk board. He'd then leave the class room.

On his return he'd immediately identify which sequences were random by coin flip and which the students had created. He said he was able to do that because the sequences of flipped coins would invariably have longer strings of heads or tails.

IOWs, random will produce coincidences that seem improbable to us.

Lou Figueroa

On another note like this, Amazon music has a shuffle feature that was randomizing plays. But when people were using it they though it was not random enough and complained, so they modified the algorithm to be less random so humans felt it was more random LOL