Winning, Losing or Drawing streaks

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Stewart Reuben
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Re: Winning, Losing or Drawing streaks

Post by Stewart Reuben » Fri Feb 17, 2012 11:13 pm

Michael is correct. But the odds are not uniform. Many games are played in Swisses and the more you win, the harder it becomes. Thus the odds will drop way below 50% for each game. Players scoring 9/9 in a tournament is a rare occurrence indeed. Of course team matches are different. But I have still never heard of anybody emulating Fischer's 20 in a row.

Ian Thompson
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Re: Winning, Losing or Drawing streaks

Post by Ian Thompson » Fri Feb 17, 2012 11:36 pm

Stewart Reuben wrote:But I have still never heard of anybody emulating Fischer's 20 in a row.
Claude Bloodgood is an obvious candidate for someone who might have had an extremely long winning streak of rated games. (See here for those who don't know who he was.)

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Re: Winning, Losing or Drawing streaks

Post by Stewart Reuben » Sat Feb 18, 2012 1:31 am

Of course winning 20 or 30 in a row is nothing unusual in a simultaneous display. Even I played 161 at the Daily Mail Boys and Girls Exhibition and wouldn't even have noticed if I won 20 in a row.

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Re: Winning, Losing or Drawing streaks

Post by Ian Stephens » Sat Feb 18, 2012 12:51 pm

Ian Thompson wrote:Claude Bloodgood is an obvious candidate for someone who might have had an extremely long winning streak of rated games.
Hmm... not sure about Bloodgood Ian, whilst exposing the flaw in the USCF grading system may have been a good for chess, it doesn't quite balance with matricide, and there was suggestion a high proportion of his wins were contrived in order to expose the flaw.
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Ian Stephens
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Re: Winning, Losing or Drawing streaks

Post by Ian Stephens » Sat Feb 18, 2012 1:08 pm

Stewart Reuben wrote:Of course winning 20 or 30 in a row is nothing unusual in a simultaneous display. Even I played 161 at the Daily Mail Boys and Girls Exhibition.
Stewart I am curious to know the match result of the aforementioned simul, but for the purpose of this thread I must exclude simuls.
Ex-President of Liverpool Chess Club, now mere Tournament Controller and Chief bottle washer.

Stewart Reuben
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Re: Winning, Losing or Drawing streaks

Post by Stewart Reuben » Sat Feb 18, 2012 4:37 pm

Ian since you sort of asked, I scored 80+%. The purpose of the exercise - and it was a lot of exercise - was to publicise the whole event. I played on a replacement basis. There is no way 160 people in their right minds would have sat down to play me. But it was a British record of a type. Bob Wade took it up to 180 the following year, leaving an hour left for it to be broken the next. But sadly his was the last of the series.
he reason I raised it is because Claude Bloodgood could play an immense number of opponents who were a very weak captive audience. There is a 2600+ Russian who got there by beating 2200 opponents and thus gaining one Rating point per game. I think, he made no effort to get even an IM title.

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John Clarke
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Re: Winning, Losing or Drawing streaks

Post by John Clarke » Sat Feb 18, 2012 9:43 pm

Stewart Reuben wrote: By the way, Dan Harrington made money on roulette due to the wheels being biased at various casinos. Apparently the bias could start being detected after only 90 minutes play. The casinos had no idea what was going on. Unfortunately MIT hit on the same idea. They were unable to make it profitable, so they wrote a book on the subject. The casinos then changed their systems and it was also made illegal to use computers in American casinos.
Would that be the Eudaemons you're referring to? The book about their activities was The Eudaemonic Pie by Thomas A Bass, published in 1991 (and titled The Newtonian Casino in the UK). Well worth a read even 20 years later.

BTW, the Eudaemons were based at the University of California, Santa Cruz, not MIT. But it was an MIT crowd who spawned a number of card-counting teams trying to beat the casinos at blackjack for about 20 years from 1979.
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(He doesn't let you resign and start again, either.)

Stewart Reuben
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Re: Winning, Losing or Drawing streaks

Post by Stewart Reuben » Sat Feb 18, 2012 10:19 pm

John, I expect you are correct and my memory played me false.
Card counting to beat the casinos at Blackjack really wasn't all that difficult. I wasn't quite good enough to win by myself. Other friends of mine had no problem, provided the casinos didn't ban them - as they did me on a few occasions. In Elista in 1998 we went to the casino daily and won money every day. My Dutch associate was better than me. After a time each day we would get bored and go back to our hotel.
John Brew of Grieveson Grant pointd out that, when Korchnoi drew level in 1978 there were a huge number of examples in golf where he would prompt lose the next game. AS he did.

Kevin Thurlow
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Re: Winning, Losing or Drawing streaks

Post by Kevin Thurlow » Mon Feb 20, 2012 12:07 pm

"I raised it is because Claude Bloodgood could play an immense number of opponents who were a very weak captive audience."

Literally a "captive audience"!
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Paul Cooksey

Re: Winning, Losing or Drawing streaks

Post by Paul Cooksey » Mon Feb 20, 2012 8:57 pm

In another thread:
Alex Holowczak wrote:For example. Yang-Fan Zhou had these results in one rating period last year: http://ratings.fide.com/individual_calc ... 2011-05-01
Includes 19 wins in a row (possibly, chronology a bit unclear). Ended by Jack Rudd of this parish.

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IM Jack Rudd
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Re: Winning, Losing or Drawing streaks

Post by IM Jack Rudd » Mon Feb 20, 2012 11:10 pm

Paul Cooksey wrote:In another thread:
Alex Holowczak wrote:For example. Yang-Fan Zhou had these results in one rating period last year: http://ratings.fide.com/individual_calc ... 2011-05-01
Includes 19 wins in a row (possibly, chronology a bit unclear). Ended by Jack Rudd of this parish.
Marcus Harvey actually beat him in the Uxbridge tournament, although this didn't get into the calculations because Marcus was unrated at the time.

Paul Dargan
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Re: Winning, Losing or Drawing streaks

Post by Paul Dargan » Tue Feb 21, 2012 3:45 pm

Check out Jonathan Hawkins results on the new ECF Grading site... that looks like 20 wins in a row - and 25 games unbeaten since he lost to Short

http://www.ecfgrading.org.uk/?ref=17427 ... 1222827417


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