Yahtzee: The Metaphor for Life

Every now and again people come up with nonsensical theories on how baseball (or football or golf or...insert favorite sport/hobby/etc.) is a metaphor for life. Well, I can be just as non-sensical as anyone else.

My theory of Yahtzee has always been to hit the "bonus" from above. You garner an extra 35 points. That means it is often better to fill your 4s instead of 4 of a Kind when you get 4 4's even if the 5th dies is a 6. If you drop that score below in the "4s" box you score only 22 points but if you had to take, say...2 1s it conceivably gives you 51 points if placed above...16 for the 4-4s and another 35 for hitting the 63 point threshold.

At the same time, sometimes people jump the gun on stuff like straights. they get nervous because they "only" have one shot at it and end up shifting gears in the middle and going for something else random, often ending up filling in Chance instead. But after they fill in their score they want to go back and "see what would have happened" by re-rolling the dice.

The problem is...the time has passed. You pick up the die from a different position than it was in, shake it a different way or number of times than you would have shaken it (or them if you needed to re-roll more than one) and thus the dynamics are different. In short...regardless of what comes up there is only a 1 in 6 chance (or less) it is what you would have rolled; any given time you roll a die there is a 1 in 6 chance of it falling on any given number. I am sure some statistician could add layers of "the odds of rolling the same number 2 times in succession is x because of y" but for my nefarious purposes...1 in 6 is close enough. To be technical it might be 0.027777777777...but do we care? not really.

Well, often enough in life people want to "Do the Yahtzee". They want to talk about what would have happened if they had not taken thus and such a job or if they wipe out the past (divorce, bankruptcy, etc), by "starting over".

The problem is...the dynamics have changed. You are not the person you were, the circumstances are not what they were. Things have changed. You won't find out "what would have happened", you can only find out "what is going to happen next".

It always stuns me when historians, often reputable ones, talk about how the battle would have been decided differently if thus and such would have happened. If the cavalry had returned earlier, if the general would have committed his reserve, etc.

Pure bollocks. People do not always perform as anticipated. Who knows but what the division he attacked with his reserve pulled a Iron Brigade a la Stonewall Jackson? Or perhaps this would have alerted the enemies own "lost patrol" who then return at a key time. The outcome of the battle MAY have changed...but it might not.

Perhaps the Japanese were fated (by God for believers, by some mystical, unfeeling force for non) to lose the Battle of Midway and instead of losing with his planes on the carriers he would have instead lost all his planes to American flyers "in the zone". Maybe the Sioux and their allies would have made smarter attacks and wiped out Reno and Benteen had they stuck with Custer. And so forth.


You cannot say what "would" have happened in life, your own or the grand stage of history, any more than you can say what "would" have happened in Yahtzee. Sometimes you just need to say, oh well, did not go as planned to this point but we will change things in the future with better planning, more sticking to the plan, and more letting what happens happen.