I've been following this whole "gaffed chip" sequence with my usual mote of interest, and although I thoroughly enjoy lampooning the tin hat brigade, I do feel that the mathematically inclined among us are guilty of a little blindness as well.
For instance, if someone says that he/she lost 20 hands in a row playing 9/6 JoB, the response would properly be "tough luck". But what if it were 200 hands in a row? 2000? Certainly even though those numbers are "too small a sample" for ordinary analysis, there must be some threshold where even a very small sample can yield a very suspicious result, no? I am formerly a math whiz, but haven't exercised my stats muscles (ok, ANY muscles) in decades, so maybe someone else out there can refresh my memory on standard deviation/variance/Chi-Square or whatever it is called? I think I remember that six standard deviations (Six Sigma, as the business folk like to call it) is a significant boundary in that should a result fall outside of that range it would be considered "anomalous"? How many hands lost in a row WOULD be cause for concern?
Just wonderin'....