At some point in its development, every backgammon site has to post a public statement that its dice are truly random. It's a sign of BrainKing's maturity that Filip has completed that necessary ritual now. It is a universal truth that backgammon players will always, always, complain about the dice, always, always think they are treated unfairly when the dice go against them, and always, always, think they are finally being treated fairly when the dice run in their favor. When we play on a real board and can see the dice being rolled, we can only blame fortune for our problems. However, when we play online, we don't see how the dice rolls are generated, and conspiracy theories grow like weeds in a garden. It's human nature! But that doesn't mean the dice are really fair or unfair; those are meaningless terms when it comes to random events like dice rolls. It is absolutely a law of nature that one player will get better dice than the other in any given game, virtually all of the time. That is not the result of hidden malevolent forces, but the operation of the laws of chance. Everything that can happen will happen eventually, given enough time, and over the relatively short run everyone gets about the same dice. What differentiates players is what they do with those dice once they get them!
alanback: Yeah it always seems players who roll double 6's against you 3 times in a row outnumbers how many times you do the same by about a million, but we're always exaggerating stuff like that.
swordswisher: There have been times when I was so convinced that the dice were running strongly against me that I actually went back and compiled statistics on doubles,etc., only to learn that the distribution was well within the norms for random events. Of course, it's harder to determine who got the right roll at the right time ... some of the bg programs such as gnu and Snowie will compute a luck factor.
swordswisher: There have been times when I was so convinced that the dice were running strongly against me that I actually went back and compiled statistics on doubles,etc., only to learn that the distribution was well within the norms for random events. Of course, it's harder to determine who got the right roll at the right time ... some of the bg programs such as gnu and Snowie will compute a luck factor.