The thread on tennis and randomness reminded me of Persi Diaconis's two discoveries about bridge: 1) that the 'standard' method of shuffling wasn't very good and you needed to do additional shuffles to really randomize the deck. 2) bridge masters seemed to occasionally make counter-probabilistic plays [playing finesses and for suit splits, etc], but as a corollary to (1), he discovered that their play was actually correct for the *actual* probabilities [due to the inadequate shuffles]. I found it pretty impressive that the deviation from "true randomness" almost certainly wasn't all that much, but it was enough that the top bridge players could detect the deviation and took advantage of it. /bernie\ -- Bernie Cosell Fantasy Farm Fibers mailto:bernie@fantasyfarm.com Pearisburg, VA --> Too many people, too few sheep <--