King Vulture wrote:
Splitting is not our strong point...
I only play one device at a time, on the premise that groups of five or six or more should be rewarded for their sociability with a place on the site rankings. Does this make me a prude? Yes, but I don't peer down my nose at players who play multiple devices, so while I may be a prude I'm not a bigot.
Does splitting really make sense? There is only one player in my milieu who plays two devices and splits, and it doesn't seem to enhance his game play averages. Posit, for a moment, a player who splits on either-or questions, where three of the five items in a drop down box can be eliminated. If our Splitter - under the microscope you can see ROB/TRONTO - doesn't know the answer, then he is eventually going to split on two wrong answers to some future question. On one of every 6,000 flips, a nickel is going to land on its edge. But really, this is just a coin flip problem. If Heads is the correct answer and Tails the unfortunate split, what is the likelihood that you'll make three successive correct conjectures on the same device? That's only 12.5%. Granting that there is such a thing as intuition and the educated guess, your protest that real-world results are more advantageous than the math would dictate is perfectly acceptable. But then so is my rejoinder, that, if you do have a preferred answer, why take out the insurance?
In very large groups, such as the Ragged Rascals or the Fellowship, splitting twice or three times has an undeniable advantage in promoting a site score. But I play in a group of up to ten, and if I were to broach the idea that we should split strategically, I would only damage my already tenuous reputation.
The results of KING VULTURE's group, who seem to prefer the Bernoulli Process to the Gambler's Fallacy, speak for themselves.