fine whine

For the first time since September of last year, Jessica and I played Yahtzee (which a few people know as Yacht, or poker dice*) tonight.

We played six games, and I ended up beating her by a couple hundred points. A couple hundred points isn't really that much in light of how many games we've played (more numbers here), but as long as I'm keeping track I'll take the little victories where I find them.

After all, she got not one but two Yahtzee bonuses. I cannot understand why she gets more Yahtzees (5 of the same number, for the uninitiated) than I do, unless my slightly more conservative playing style is to blame.

That we are under a thousand points apart after 216 games is probably statistically insignificant (seems to be a little over 1% of either of our totals), but I don't recall anything from the classes I've taken and books I've read concerning statistics.

I do, however, remember some more elementary concepts, and was pleased to notice that, for all six games, my 'Chance' score (sum total of all 5 dice, something of a catch-all or gimme) had the same median, mean and mode.

Mean is what everybody knows as the average. Median is merely midway between the highest and lowest, and mode is the most-occurring. The latter two have always struck me as useless, and that's probably why they popped up today.

The 'math' was easy, after all - four of them were 24, and the other two a 23 and a 25. Less interesting, though much more important, was the fact that each time I managed to get the bonus 35 points for rolling enough of each number. That, combined with an uncharacteristic three Yahtzees, is probably what kept all of my scores today above average.

Whatever the case, we had fun. And in the end, that's all that matters, as long as I'm winning.

* Having recently re-discovered the origin of the "dead man's hand" I wondered if there was a corresponding roll in Yahtzee. The fact that the die faces don't directly map to the cards (aces and eights), combined with the fact that nobody has ever died playing Yahtzee (at least I found none in my twelve minutes of research), means that the "dead man's roll" will likely remain a mystery for some time.