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February 4, 2011

Strange But True!

Q. You and your hockey “fanatic” friend argue over whether it's better to bet AGAINST a team mired in a losing streak or to bet ON a team on a roll. Who's right?

A. Both these strategies are wrong, says Professor Alain Hache in “The Physics of Hockey.” He used the Monte Carlo method (computer simulation) on 100,000 virtual games, with assumed winning percentages of teams factored in. Amazingly, when Hache compared his predictions to the actual performances of a dozen teams over an entire season, he found the winning streaks fell short of expectation, just as the losing streaks did.


 
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