I recently read a blog entry that consisted about how bad luck is generally reserved for unskilled coaches and it just inspired me to share my thoughts on the matter.

These statements turn up at times, that bad luck really doesn't exist and that it's just an easy excuse for bad people. Very often the statements are made by the kind of people who very rarely miss those crucial rolls.

I don't think that anyone has missed that there is a lot of unsubstantiated whining about bad luck. Sometimes I have probably bitched too much about missing crucial rolls myself. That just seems to be how the brain works, to filter out a part of the opponents bad luck and forgetting a bit about those good rolls you make. But the idea that luck wouldn't be a major factor in a Blood Bowl game is just ludicrious.

This is a game where the effects of every action is determined by rolling a six sided dice. And there are hundreds of actions from each side in every match. A 1 means that you fail no matter how simple the action is, a 6 will land you an interception with a treeman.

Now, mathematics is not my strongest point...but just a regular portion of common sense reveals that such a system will not be entirely skill based.

Obviously there are lots of meassures for minimizing the risk taking part of the game. One should always prepare as much as possible for what happens if those crucial rolls fails. Standing your prone players up and blocking potential blitzers is important to do even if that pass you are going to make is 2+. But no matter how well you prepare the way the dice rolls will always have a huge impact on the outcome of the match. Any denial to this and you should probably start wondering why you are hiding simple facts to yourself. Maybe it's because you are a lucky bastard...

As for myself I have experienced the biggest influence of bad luck in my life when it comes to Blood Bowl. I'm a quite lucky person in general, so I'm not prone to making excuses for my failures. Neither have I claimed that I'm a great coach. There are many sharper strategical minds out there on the pitches of Fumbbl.

It's just a strange coincidence that I'm experiencing a considerably higher than average amount of bad luck in this specific game. Statistically it should even out after a while, but statistics doesn't guarantee any outcome...it's just statistics. It predicts what should happen, not what will happen.

And some things are simply unexplained. It's for example quite weird that I have experienced a very big change in luck when the new random number generator was implemented. I have played Fumbbl for about one year and had a rather stable lack of success, but during the week since the latest patch I have climbed from 146 to 152,5 in CR and managed to put that "5 match winning streak" in my Awards to compensate for the less impressing "5 match losing streak" that I have had since my start. It's of course likely just a coincidence but it shows yet again how big of an impact chance has on things.