

Why don't sports teams use randomization? - dfranke
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/11/why-dont-sports-teams-use-randomization-a-guest-post/

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BrandonM
I would love to play poker against that guy. Bluffing should never be random,
but should be a calculated move in which you believe that the opponent has
missed whatever cards they were hoping for and has a good chance of believing
that you have the best hand. To bluff randomly is to throw away money.

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eru
Actually - what you want to do is bluff randomly with very carefully
calculated probabilities.

The problem is - humans are not good at generating random bits on command.

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BrandonM
Right, but in his essay, all he says is something like, "I look down at my
watch, and if the second hand is between 0 and 6, I bluff." To me, that's
totally random, and that's not the right way to go about bluffing.

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eru
Who knows? Perhaps it's not optimal - but still better than human randomness.

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Kaizyn
Maybe for an individual team, there aren't enough games in a season to allow
for a reasonable randomized test? It would make sense, perhaps, if your major
league franchise controlled enough minor league teams, to use them as guinea
pigs. The players and coaches might get a bit upset by being used like that
though.

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soundsop
There are ~150 pitches/game x 162 games/season = 24,300 pitches/season in
baseball. Shouldn't a fraction of those be enough to establish randomization
as a useful strategy?

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mhb
What makes him think that sports teams aren't doing this kind of analysis but
consider it a competitive advantage to not publicize it?

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Tichy
Presumably he sees in the statistics that the teams aren't making the
decisions they should be making.

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mhb
Based on what he writes in the article, it doesn't look like he has done any
investigation of his own.

Viz. "To my knowledge, no sports team in the history of humankind has ever run
a random control trial to figure out which strategies work the best. (I make
this extravagant claim in hopes of provoking you all into providing some
counterexamples.)"

