Black 6-7 times in a row?

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Avatar of KeresCrusader

How do I get black 6 times in a row? What sort of logic is this...

Avatar of Martin_Stahl
KeresCrusader wrote:

How do I get black 6 times in a row? What sort of logic is this...

It's possible to have that happen but over the long run, it should be relatively even. The site gives the player most due black that color, unless you've played that opponent before, where you get the opposite color of the last game.

Avatar of fremble
If I’m mathing right, which I doubt, this will happen in 1.5% of series of six games, meaning that it should take about 67 sets of six games for this to happen, or about 400 games. Meaning that in a set of 400 games, you will have likely played a continuous series of six games where you were black in all games
Avatar of ice_cream_cake
fremble wrote:
If I’m mathing right, which I doubt, this will happen in 1.5% of series of six games, meaning that it should take about 67 sets of six games for this to happen, or about 400 games. Meaning that in a set of 400 games, you will have likely played a continuous series of six games where you were black in all games

Okay, I believe your reasoning is that a single set of 6 games has 1/64 chance of being all blacks. Using the expectation of a geometric random variable, on average it takes 1/(1/64) = 64 sets of 6 games for this unlikely event to happen. (This is more accurate than the number you arrived at through rounding wink.png)
This is a nice calculation and it goes to show that streakiness is more common than people think in random events. But note that you are actually still only considering a subset of possible events. Because you are pre-grouping all games into consecutive groups of 6, but an actual streak of black games may occur "across" two such sets. So actually we should need fewer than 6*64 = 384 games on average for this to occur.
It's known in general that humans underestimate the streakiness of random events and this is a nice example. That said, I think chess.com tries to auto-balance things a little so it gets a little harder to have long streaks.

Avatar of omnipaul

Were you aborting the games when you got black? If the server decides you should play as black to even things out, it may keep giving you black if you keep aborting until either you lose the ability to abort games from abusing the function or you get someone else doing the same thing and the server determines they are doing this thing more than you are and gives them the black pieces, instead.

Avatar of ice_cream_cake

Sidenote: while @fremble's calculation derives the average number of sets of 6 games to see an all-black set in one of them, it does not tell us about the probability that you see an all-black set in 64 consecutive sets. Fortunately, this can be calculated easily. Since the probability that a set is not all-black is 63/64, the probabiliity that all 64 sets are not all-black is (63/64)^64, or about 36.5%.
We can also note that 1/64 is relatively small, and for large n, (1-1/n)^n tends towards 1/e, which is about 36.8%, very close to the actual probability.

But as noted before @fremble is only considering a subset of cases where an all-black streak of 6 is reached. Even considering this subset, we see it is more likely than not to see such an event occur.
So yes, @fremble is right; assuming no auto-balancing, it is more likely than not to happen in a run of 384 games.

Avatar of fremble

Ice cream is correct. The actual probability would be a decent bit lower since my calculation only took into consideration sets of 6 unique games, resulting in it actually calculating the probability of getting all games as black for every six games, rather than calculating the possibility of any set of six consecutive games being all black. The main difference is that situations in which something like in a set of six games, the player is black in the last two, and in the following set of six, the first four games were played as black were not counted despite being a set of six black games simply because they were in different and completely unique sets (again, if I’m mathing correctly).

Avatar of adoubleedgedgame
KeresCrusader wrote:

How do I get black 6 times in a row? What sort of logic is this...

When did this happen? I looked at your games from today and NONE had a streak of 6 blacks in a row.

Avatar of omnipaul
Qualitychess1234 wrote:
KeresCrusader wrote:

How do I get black 6 times in a row? What sort of logic is this...

When did this happen? I looked at your games from today and NONE had a streak of 6 blacks in a row.

If this is the case, then they probably were aborting whenever they got black. These games wouldn't show up on their list, and the aborting would make it more likely for the server to keep giving them black.

Avatar of adoubleedgedgame
omnipaul wrote:
Qualitychess1234 wrote:
KeresCrusader wrote:

How do I get black 6 times in a row? What sort of logic is this...

When did this happen? I looked at your games from today and NONE had a streak of 6 blacks in a row.

If this is the case, then they probably were aborting whenever they got black. These games wouldn't show up on their list, and the aborting would make it more likely for the server to keep giving them black.

Yeah, that's what I'm trying to get them to say for confirmation.

Avatar of ice_cream_cake
omnipaul wrote:
Qualitychess1234 wrote:
KeresCrusader wrote:

How do I get black 6 times in a row? What sort of logic is this...

When did this happen? I looked at your games from today and NONE had a streak of 6 blacks in a row.

If this is the case, then they probably were aborting whenever they got black. These games wouldn't show up on their list, and the aborting would make it more likely for the server to keep giving them black.

Ok yeah, bad sportsmanship then
To OP -- based on a limited sample size tbf -- your win rate (in rapids) is indeed higher as white, but that shouldn't be a motivation to selectively play white if you want to improve. You should investigate what positions are giving you trouble as black

Avatar of clearwaterfalls
You always get black if in the previous game you lost
Avatar of Staerex
clearwaterfalls wrote:
You always get black if in the previous game you lost

That's not how the pairing works, winning doesn't determine the colour your get in your next game.

https://support.chess.com/article/1304-how-can-i-choose-my-color.