In article
,
" wrote:

On Mar 9, 6:45*pm, Tim McNamara wrote:

Another example: the house in casino gambling typically has an
advantage of just a few percent in any given bet (for many casino
games, not slots). If you didn't know this, and placed 10 or 20
bets, you'd win close to half, and lose close to half. You
wouldn't be able to tell that the house had an advantage. *Does
this mean that the house's advantage is negligible? *In the long
run, over many bets and many bettors, the house does not think
so.

Of course, if all you ever do in the casino is make 10 small bets
and then leave, maybe you don't care that the house is taking a
little from you on average. *Cheap entertainment and all that.
*But if you care about winning, or losing as slowly as possible
to prolong the entertainment, then you might care about small
differences in the odds. *Casinos have better odds than state
lotteries; blackjack has better odds than roulette; both have
better odds than slots. *There are entire websites devoted to
this, so somebody doesn't think it's negligible.

The house's advantage is overwhelming in many of these games- they
win every time the customer loses, and there are far more ways to
lose than to win. *Bike racing does not function the same way.
*Blackjack is perhaps the best analogue.

Your description of why the house wins at casino gambling is
incorrect. For many bets, there are more ways to lose than win, but
the house pays off a win at more than 1:1. For some bets, the odds
are only a little worse than 1:1 and the house pays off at 1:1. The
ratio the house pays off at is carefully chosen to give the house a
small advantage. If the advantage were overwhelming, the customers
would lose money too quickly and not come back.

Consider roulette. There's 38 numbers on a Vegas roulette wheel. If
you bet on a single number the house pays off at 35:1. If you bet on
red or black the house pays off at 1:1 and its small winning margin
comes from the green numbers. More info and an odds table he
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roulette

If a roulette wheel was a bit uneven, it would take hundreds of tries
to reveal at 3-sigma significance that some numbers were a few
percent better. However, someone who had been lucky enough to be
betting on the good numbers would be, _on average_, ahead by that few
percent. Not negligible.

And also unlikely to be significant.

Most of the time in bike racing you don't win, even if you are Bret.
If you can do something to increase the odds of winning, it helps,
even though it will be difficult to show by a post facto evaluation
of statistics that you improved. Model-building helps to evaluate
claims of improvement, because only in very unusual cases would you
be able to show a direct causal link between the change you made and
a win.

That being the point I've been making, except that basically in most
cases you'd be unable to show *any* link. So, then, how do you evaluate
what improvements are worth chasing and which are not?

This really is not restricted to equipment despite your insisting
that it is a gearhead question.

Agreed, except that the thread was prompted by a question about gearhead
stuff- a pair of tires- and not about training. Trying to stick at
least a bit to the original premise here. I think that racers can get
far larger improvements from training and tactics changes than from a
pair of tires or a water bottle or a frame 6 ounces lighter, and that
the far larger improvements are more likely to have a positive outcome
in races.

If I trained harder and improved my power at lactate threshold by
5-10 watts, I think it would improve my chance of winning races (if I
got off my ass and raced). However, it would be difficult to analyze
any given race post facto and say that my power improvement was the
deciding factor. Except for time trials, which are easier to
analyze, but I have heard in this thread that they don't count.

You're talking to the wrong guy about that. TTs are fine by me because
they make measurement easier. It's just hard to transfer that to crits
and road races and that caveat must be borne in mind.