Why don't sports teams use randomization? | Hacker News Reader

Why don't sports teams use randomization?

freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com

18 pointsdfranke10 comments

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.

I would love to play poker against you

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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

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

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.)"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com