I've already commented on it, but I've come across this before. It is truly a serious mind #### until you can wrap your head around it. So I'm going to *attempt* an extremely condensed version for those people who aren't getting what it is saying, or are disagreeing with the research based on personal experience.

Basically here's the deal (as I understand it). If you are flipping a coin, you know that 50% of the time it's going to come up heads. That is if you keep flipping forever you'll have and equal number of heads and an equal number of tails results. This is intuitive.

However, if you flip the coin the first three times and come up with heads all three times, you *might* be inclined to believe that you are affecting the outcome somehow, or that this coin is more likely to come up heads. This is false and I think we can all agree on that.

If you are good with statistics you can predict just how likely any given streak is. In a 50/50 toss up, a streak of 5 might have a likelyhood of 1 in 100. This isn't exactly far fetched. It's unlikely, but given enough tries, it'll happen 1 in 100 times.

Now lets pretend like instead of a coin, it's a 50% field goal shooter. He makes 5 consecutive shots. You say, "He's got a hot hand tonight." However, just like the coin he does this with a specific regularity, in fact 1 in 100 times he makes 5 consecutive shots. *IF* the "hot hand" actually existed, then he'd have more 5 consecutive shot streaks than the statistics predict (he's a streaky player). But he doesn't. Not over his season, or career, or anything. Not only has he not done it, no one has. They've looked at ass loads of data, searching for just such an occurance, and why not? Everyone knows it exists. Our player can feel it when he plays, but the fact of the matter is that regardless of how he feels, his streaks happen with exactly the frequency of that coin flip.

Now, his streak might come at an opportune time, so it is remembered. That means he's clutch, right? No, because he isn't having those streaks in "clutch" situations any more than he should. He's having them at essentially random intervals, and we are only remembering those clutch streaks, but not all the other times. It really is that simple, but the unintuitiveness is mind boggling.

What if our player is only a 40% shooter next year? Well then next year he won't have as many 5 hit streaks. If over his carreer he's 45% then he won't have quite a 1 in 100 rate of 5 hit streaks. You might think that he would, I mean what about that season when he was shooting lights out at 60% and seems like he couldn't miss in the playoffs? Sorry no, he's a 45% career shooter and his 5 hit streaks occur at the below 1 in 100 rate. For that season they are higher, but overall they are as predicted.

But what about the other factors? Apparently they all cancel out, just like a coin flip, it is totally predictable. It's that simple, but it's very difficult to believe.