Winning streaks - why do they exist?

Demon

Demon

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A winning streak happens when a person or team gets in a streak of winning.

The problem is that said person or team being in a winning streak doesn't necessarily point to said person or team being consistently good - once the winning streak is over, said person or team may be mediocre.

You can try to figure in mathematical luck when speaking of winning streaks, but the duration of exceptional winning streaks rules mathematical luck mathematically implausible.

So my question is, why do winning streaks exist?
 
I would say that winning streaks are a combination of luck and skill. You have to have a certain amount of luck when "streaking" because the streak continues up until it is broken. More teams/players require more luck than skill, but many players will think that it is just pure skill, when that is not true. Every streak has to have at least .0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% luck in there, because without luck, it wouldn't happen.
 
I have also seen Streaks come about because of teams being so well drilled and disciplined that they are able to adapt to most situations and emerge victorious, weaker teams they and luck of the draw and skill are all apart of it as well.

But a streak exist because people gel well and reach there peak at the same time.

Look at the 1970 LA Lakers they won 33 games straight and a little closer to home, for me anyway, In the AFL the Carlton Blues won 20 games out of 22 in 1995 the had to streaks of multiple games won Losing in round 11 to the lowest ranking team and once again later in the Season.They eventually went on to win the Pennant.

It also happened to the Bombers as well they 21 games straight, but lost in the last round by a single goal, They also went on to win the Pennant:lew:

Streaks are not often spoken about with in a team, they are usually Taboo but are often hyped up by the Media and this can cause players to become complacent and comfortable.

On a more singular level in games you win time after time because you are simply better and you understand the inner workings of fighting games, racing games and such.....I once won 107 fight on tekken but lost because I became bored with just winning and wasn't concentrating.

Everyone was quite pleased that I lost:lew:
 
I'd put a lot of it down to morale boosts. Winning something can give a person or team an enormous boost of confidence and can lead to a magnificently increased level of performance.

I believe it is always much easier to win something once you win it once, as you may hold the belief within yourself that you are good at it and can win. This is only a momentary boost, however. As soon as you are defeated or stop for a while it could fade.

Aside from sport, I think this works for anything in life, even gaming. There may be days when I just can't play very well against others because I've been beaten in a few games, my morale is down, and it decreases my performance. On other days, however, I may have a really good game where I did really well, and that may likely be followed by a good performance in the next games. Obviously fantastic skill on the side of another team can counter this boost, but it does give an extra helping hand behind you.

As soon as the morale boost ends a person will be back to their usual levels of performance, or will fail on occasion (decreasing morale can have the opposite effect), and therefore not appearing consistent.
 
Winning streaks can have many factors to them. Luck is one element. A team/person can actually be a good, well-rounded team/person and just be that overpowering for the most part. There is also the officials, and how they "feel" like calling a game (yes, I'm throwing out the conspiracy theory card). But all of these factors count toward a potential winning streak.

But in any sport/game, the best team/player doesn't always win. I could go on and on about teams that overcame the odds and won. One example I'll use is the 2004 Boston Red Sox. They weren't supposed to beat the better, more talented New York Yankees, but did so, and in dramatic fashion. Being down 3 games to none in a best of 7 series, and somehow pulled off the biggest upset in baseball history. And did so by scoring the tying run in the bottom of the 9th inning off baseball postseason's best closer in history. Then eventually won on a walk-off homerun. This propelled ridiculous momentum that carried them through rest of that series to win the American League Championship. The momentum carried to a sweep of the World Series, though they did have a better team than the St. Louis Cardinals. But the Sox should never have beat the Yankees, because they were the better team. And doing so in the most improbable way.

Winning streaks happen. The Sox weren't as good of a team, but they had way more heart and spirit, and that was enough chemistry to overcome any obstacle.
 
For some reason I thought this was in "rocket town" =P. So this response is centered around games.

Well, honestly.. I think "streaks" in general are mostly about skill. These days the maps games are producing are becoming smaller, so the randomness and spam that goes along with them are heightened. As well the amount of explosives play a major part as well in creating the pure chaos, though there always seem to be someone who can kill 7 folks in less than 10 seconds a part due to pure skill, and not primarily Kill streak rewards and grenade spam.

Skill comes from awareness and control of surroundings. When I go into a new map for instance, I am very mediocre. I usually go on an exploration route and then will find a few spots to set up for small streaks. My area of expertise is defending using a very primitive technique where I patrol a certain part of the map in a semicircular fashion. I usually turn up the volume for foot steps and pay attention to call outs from team mates. Now with call of duty type games, there is actually a lot less skill due to the overwhelming about of perks/deathstreaks to aid the players. So holding out with death streaks, when the map is not "huge", it is a feat even to the most skilled players.

You have god awful players using a Noob tube tactic where they will either equip a grenade launcher attachment on a gun, and run amock spamming rooms with explosions which usually insta kill you. Now I haven't played black ops or anything along those lines so I'll digress to another point.

Most folks have to learn steady hand-eye coordination as well as controlling when shooting under fire, especially sniping where reloads become very slow. Head shots are what most think about but when it comes to newer games, you don't really need them unless you are not that great of a player.

For games such as Quake 3 arena though, well there are VAAAAASSTTT amounts of skill here, because not only do you have to worry about firing while making strafe routes, you have to learn how to shoot while in the air, and very accurately mind you. Otherwise you might as well uninstall from frustration.

Every streak has it's glory, but real streaks come from skilled players. And the most knowledgeable game to do this was unreal tournament. They brought the "umph" people were wanting to have for streaks. "Multi-Kill" "Headshot" "Humiliation"

 
Argor251 said:
I'd put a lot of it down to morale boosts. Winning something can give a person or team an enormous boost of confidence and can lead to a magnificently increased level of performance.
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This was my thinking. I know when I've played hockey with my school team, we've been on winning (and losing) streaks. It normally begins when you have an abnormally good game and suddenly you think 'hey, we can win this as well'. Likewise, it often ends if you get beaten and suddenly it's 'hey, maybe we can't do it. We just got beat.'

I'd say it's mainly about mentality. If you go into a game thinking 'we're never going to win' then you probably won't win. But if you go into it thinking 'we're going to beat these guys' you're much more likely to stand a chance.

Likewise if you've got a team that gel, you're much more likely to do well. With cadets a while back I went on a leadership course and my team was apparently the one that gelled the best - we completed almost all the tasks set and me and my team mates came out with some of the best marks, all because everyone got on really well with each other.

I've gone on about sport but when I saw the title my main thought was about call of duty :8F: winning streaks on that happen mainly through skill in my opinion, if you're a bad player chances are you won't get good k/ds for more than 1 or 2 matches at a time.
 
Chargar got what I wanted to say exactly.

I read this from a book too. If I'm not wrong, the book was '100 Ways to Motivate Yourself' by Steve Chandler. I might be wrong, take note, but anyway, what I read was that it's all in the head. It's all in YOUR thinking. If you've went for enough motivational seminars, you'll realize that most of the speakers would go on and on about mentality, and thinking. (Admittedly a reason why I get somewhat turned off by such seminars, especially since the speakers can earn so much for so little)

There's also this book... 'Master Key System', if I'm not wrong? It's also going at it about mentality.

Well, to move back to the topic on Winning Streaks. Yes. I think they exist because of the mentality that that winner adopts. A belief in a success in the next win is no doubt a morale booster - a performance booster as well, if I may so add. That, and who knows, the other side may have contrasting thoughts?

And of course, not that you can get a winning streak just because you think you can when you don't even have the skills... Even if you're telling yourself you can do it, unless you have some latent potential, you're pretty much delusional, I guess XD
 
Finalczen you said
"You can try to figure in mathematical luck when speaking of winning streaks, but the duration of exceptional winning streaks rules mathematical luck mathematically implausible."
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Which makes no sense. Are you talking about probabilities? If a winning streak happens then it by definition has a probability of happening no matter how small that probability is. I assume you are referring to the UConn ladies bball team. If you assume that the probability of winning a basketball game is .5 (50%) than the streak of 90 wins has a probability of 8.1*10^-28th. But let us be more realistic- over the last decade Geno A's winning percentage is 86%. Which makes the probability of the 90 straight wins 1.3*10^-6th OR .0000013. And that is based on pure probability not even accounting for specific skills (other than coach's winning %) or motivation.
 
Rydrum2112 said:
Finalczen you said

Which makes no sense. Are you talking about probabilities? If a winning streak happens then it by definition has a probability of happening no matter how small that probability is. I assume you are referring to the UConn ladies bball team. If you assume that the probability of winning a basketball game is .5 (50%) than the streak of 90 wins has a probability of 8.1*10^-28th. But let us be more realistic- over the last decade Geno A's winning percentage is 86%. Which makes the probability of the 90 straight wins 1.3*10^-6th OR .0000013. And that is based on pure probability not even accounting for specific skills (other than coach's winning %) or motivation.
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Yes, probabilities.

And if I understand you right, either way, the odds are still horrible when we're speaking from a mathematical standpoint. Saying that the odds of a winning streak are 0.000-and-so-on when winning streaks are just a bit more common, kind of defies a probability argument that (many) winning streaks come from pure probability. You tend to either come up with a low number or a huge-string-of-events argument.
 
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Final
"And if I understand you right, either way, the odds are still horrible when we're speaking from a mathematical standpoint."
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This depends, this is the probability that UConn women under Geno would do this streak. Lets be more general,

But if you think of it more generally, what is the probability that any team at any time point can attain this streak?

Well if we start at 1972 (when women's basketball first started awarding national championship) that is 38 years. So we find how many different sets of 3 consecutive years there are and multiple our probability above (something like 36). Then multiply that by the number of teams in D1 (338, currently).

As you see it is actually sort of likely to see these results, especially when taking into account coaches winning%'s. Because a few teams are so dominant in that sport it makes it more likely to see it.
 
Rydrum2112 said:
Final

This depends, this is the probability that UConn women under Geno would do this streak. Lets be more general,

But if you think of it more generally, what is the probability that any team at any time point can attain this streak?

Well if we start at 1972 (when women's basketball first started awarding national championship) that is 38 years. So we find how many different sets of 3 consecutive years there are and multiple our probability above (something like 36). Then multiply that by the number of teams in D1 (338, currently).

As you see it is actually sort of likely to see these results, especially when taking into account coaches winning%'s. Because a few teams are so dominant in that sport it makes it more likely to see it.
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Well, your example was good, and I might agree with the statistics you provided for that particular example.

When you say that a few teams are so dominant in sports that they're (a lot) more likely to see it (large winning streaks), I don't know... some teams are good, but we start getting into applying a huge-string-of-events argument when saying that a team has very high statistics of winning coming into a game, and to be honest such an argument for the subject is a bit weak - it may be mathematically sound, I don't really know, but I'm just saying.

I didn't base this thread on the Uconn women though, I was speaking more in general of what I see. However it is a bit simpler to apply mathematics to the example you mentioned.
 
Yeah it is much easier to talk about certain things thru an application. I mean if I just started talking about expected values and probability spaces I am sure I would even bore myself.

The most probability I do in the stats class I teach, is 1/2 a lecture and its just an intro bit. I understand its importance but it is a pretty dry topic in general.
 
Its all about confidence.

I'm reading a book at the minute about a fella who started managing amatuer football (not eggball) matches in the Manchester area, and how his first team were a bunch of kids who hadn't a clue what they were doing and were on a huge run of losses and close to relegation to the tier below. He gave them the confidence (and a few players he knew) to perform way above expectation. It wasnt the tactics so much, it wasnt the skill, it was creating a close knit group of people who would play for each other. He gave each player a role. The tougher players were ball winners, the more skillful ones dictated the tempo and how the game was played by their terms.

They ended up winning a cup or something, I cant remember, and did well in their league.

In professional sport you see it all the time. Right now as I type this, Chelsea have went through the worst bad streak since 1997 or some shit. You watch them play and they don't play for each other, they dont have confidence in each other, even though all the players in the team are highly skillful and could walk into any team in the world. Yet, the season before when they won the league, they were the opposite.
 
Partly skill, partly luck, partly timing, partly motivation.
If you start winning, the confidence comes, with confidence you get motivation and self belief and thus stronger. Willpower is an amazing thing and is bolstered by success. If you start doing well the odds of you continuing to do so increase as your belief in your own and your team's abilities to succeed increase.
That doesn't change, sport, war, games, it's all the same. If you do well for a while the self belief carries you over. Of course you can still lose, no doubt about that, self belief pales when faced with seriously superior power but it's still a big boon.

Statistics are funny things by the by, things which are incredibly unlikely happen all the time because the settings in which they may occur are so prevalent. If you throw a ball at a single blade of grass you could hit it, if it's at a huge range it'll be tougher. If you throw a hundred then chances are you probably will hit it. If you get a thousand people doing it then it's going to happen pretty quickly.
World's a big place, universe even more so. Unlikely things are incredibly likely to occur.
 
Being a fairly avid sportsman myself I'd say it comes mostly down to confidence and morale. If you can win a game then it gives you more confidence to go out and try and win the next game, if you do then you get more confidence and it goes on and on. However, it also has the opposite effect too, the more games you lose the less confidence you have and you're more likely to go on a losing streak. If you look around and see other quality players in your team that can change a game in a split second then that gives a MASSIVE boost in confidence and morale.

That said, there are other factors naturally. Luck has a part to play, as does skill - lets be honest, if you're not good at something, 99/100 you'll be turned over by someone who is. Then you get factors like whether the ref is shit or not (depending it's a refereed sport).
 
A winning streak being brought to peoples attention builds hype. It gets people into the game/event. Even people that aren't fans of said sport will tune in. Lots of people tune in to see them lose, others tune in to see them win and keep it going. That's how it is for every big game or sporting event. Even non fans want to be included just for the sake of being a part of it.
A team on a big winning streak also bring out the best of each and every opponent they face. On the given day, they will get their opponents absolute best shot. People are competitive and love a chance to end something that another team is striving for(losing streak is NOT included.)
 
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