What you calculated are not the chances of the opponent not beating you, you calculated the chance of getting the first hit. But it is the last ship being hit that will make you lose.
Imagine player A using a regular strategy, and B using this stacking strategy. Now imagine that B gets insanely lucky and sinks all of A’s ships except their largest one, without missing any at all (while A keeps missing all their shots). So now, even after all that insane luck from player B, who has a better chance of winning? At this point, they both have only 5 spaces which can be hit, and any hit will quickly end the game, so they both have 50% chance to win right?
This means that clearly if B doesn’t get insanely lucky in the first turns of the game, then A will have much better chances to win. A’s chance to win reduces to it’s absolute minimum at 50% when it has only one single 5-length ship left.
What you calculated are not the chances of the opponent not beating you, you calculated the chance of getting the first hit. But it is the last ship being hit that will make you lose.
Imagine player A using a regular strategy, and B using this stacking strategy. Now imagine that B gets insanely lucky and sinks all of A’s ships except their largest one, without missing any at all (while A keeps missing all their shots). So now, even after all that insane luck from player B, who has a better chance of winning? At this point, they both have only 5 spaces which can be hit, and any hit will quickly end the game, so they both have 50% chance to win right?
This means that clearly if B doesn’t get insanely lucky in the first turns of the game, then A will have much better chances to win. A’s chance to win reduces to it’s absolute minimum at 50% when it has only one single 5-length ship left.