50% chance that you get your 18th center and 50% chance the other guy gets his 18th center? No.

50% chance that you get your 18th center and 50% chance the other guy gets the stalemate line so you have to draw? No.

50% chance that each turn you could get your 18th center if you just guess right and one of these times you are bound to get it? No.

Unfortunately I've only got two wins under my belt and fortunately neither was quite that close.

Well, have you ever been on stale-mate breaking 50%? That would be painful if you lost it for the rest of the board.

I'm sitting in a game where I have 17 as does my opponent and he has a 50% chance of winning this go.
If I out guess him though, we stale mate

and they say diplomacy involves no luck, that's bullshit

I've been part of a stalemate line stopping someone from winning that had two points of 50% chance of holding the line and we guessed correctly for three years before it fell apart.

Hahaha. That's great.

@ottovanbis: Diplomacy involves no lucky as all the moves are entered deterministically - unless you use a random method to decide on certain moves. However, one player does not know the moves of the other, so hidden information is involved for any given player. For this hidden information the same mathematical tools like for probability theory can be used, so you end up with percentages and chances in this case. So, here 50% means there are two equally likely scenarios your opponent moves, and in one you lose, and in the other you win with a given set of moves. And with another pair of moves, this is reversed. Therefore, you can also use a coin toss to decide upon your move set and let that decide.
That is like paper-rock-scissors - people can decide what to take, put from game theory one should chose any of them with a propability of 1/3.

I've hit that sort of thing quite a few times yes.
Personally once the game gets to a 50/50, I normally try and outguess my opponent on the first one, then go randomly for the next few.

Yes, SEcki, what you just explained (as if I was three years old) is commonly referred to as LUCK. You have a 50 50 chance, though the odds are the same, what happens does not match the odds for given experience. In these situations, and that's what this thread is about so I assumed you would take that as context, some luck is involved when you realize all the possibilities and hope like Hell that your opponent isn't going with the only one that works against your random option (if all options are equally good but not perfect and you need to get a match up to create a perfect situation).