But, nevertheless, "hot hand" thing exists.
Regardless of what some sad-ass intern may try to prove.
And it is not necessary mystic (though, who knows, maybe mystic helps). Morale bonus, confidence, feeling an opponent's weakness, etc, greatly raises the hit rate.
Basketball shot is not a dice throw.

You might expect it to (I would), but people have spent a lot of time looking for it in multiple sports and it doesn't seem to show up. Basketball and baseball are easy examples because they're so easily quantified and extensively documented-- if I want to know one hitter's batting average on grass fields, during the day, with a runner on second and 1 out, I can get it. A few possibilities:

1) The "hot hand" exists, but it's miniscule. Still, if it can't be provably measured with multiple seasons of data, it's not really worth talking about.

2) It exists, but is canceled by everything else going on. If you have the "hot hand", maybe you feel confident, but the other team is also paying more attention to you. Maybe you feel an opponent's weakness, but your opponent is now conscious of it and protects it.

3) Maybe confidence is actually a neutral factor-- you don't hesitate, but you also underestimate your opponent.

From my own experience I can tell, for example, that in european football (in a certain county it's called soccer) there are days when almost every hit ends with a goal and there are days when you miss all the time. Many experienced players feel such days before they actually know the final score.

My point is that your experience (and mine) is deceptive. A lot of gamblers swear by hot and cold streaks based on personal experience. They're entirely wrong. It's exactly my point about how people read logs, credit the skill code with non-existent rules, etc.

If you have a good, measured counterexample from football/soccer, chess, or another sport, please provide it. It's entirely possible it exists in some competitions but not others, but I haven't seen it, and my last stats professor swore the absence of a "hot hand" was surprisingly universal.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com