The formula for the magic number is derived straightforwardly as follows. As before, at some particular point in the season let team "A" have WA wins and LA losses. Suppose that at some later time, team "A" has wA additional wins and lA additional losses, and define similarly WB, LB, wB, lB for team "B". The total number of wins that team "B" needs to make up is thus given by (WA + wA) − (WB + wB). Team "A" clinches when this number exceeds the number of games team "B" has remaining, since at that point team "B" cannot make up the deficit even if team "A" fails to win any more games. If there are a total of G games in the season, then the number of games remaining for team "B" is given by G − (WB + wB + LB + lB). Thus the condition for team "A" to clinch is that (WA + wA) − (WB + wB) = 1 + G − (WB + wB + LB + lB). Canceling the common terms, we obtain wA + lB = G + 1 − WA − LB, which establishes the magic number formula. <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/confused.gif" alt="" />
[color:"blue"]Straight from Wikepedia [/color]
See, it's not that confusing.
