Hey!
Sorry to disapppoint you, but your excel sheet calculation is complete nonsense.
Though it might look logical to some people and raise their hopes, it isn't acurate.
The nasty thing about chances is that they dont orient to your prior experiments/giveaways.
That means that though your overall chances in winning are higher the more giveaways you enter (or the less entrys they got), your chances in winning WON'T raise for the next giveaways after you lost some (or 1000).
cheers anyway ;)
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^This.
You're answering the wrong question using your spreadsheet. When will I win implies that your spreadsheet uses the number of contests you've entered to predict when you will win.
Perhaps a better question is how statistically probable is it that I've entered X number of contests and never won. So, at least it is useful for calculating how unlucky you are (which is probably not as unlucky as a lot of people think).
Granted, I haven't actually looked at the spreadsheet.
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pretty sure I addressed this either on the spreadsheet or in the text wall... but yeah, all the contests you enter are independent of eachother and luck doesn't care how many you enter since, well, independent. BUT, what my calculations do say are the chances of getting at least 1 win. Like the coin flip example. Of course, the data would be skewed a bit if each sample size was different (ie, contests with 4000, 100, 10, and 30000000 entries).
what I'm trying to do with this is give an impression, based on a history of events, what the chances are of getting at least 1 win. that number does increase. but again, it has no barring on the individual contest you enter.
the reality of the situation is that while flipping an infinite amount of coins, you'll have a nearly 100% chance to get at least a heads in there... it is still purely independent and you could just wind up with an infinite amount of tails. though when looking at the system as a whole it would appear improbable, but it is still possible.
so overall, this was just a fun little tool to help give people some perspective on probability and chance. it was never meant to be a genie that would predict when they would win. just a small diversion while they wait for their points to slowly build up again.
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Pretty sure add/subtract and multiply/divide are functions used in math.
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No , maths is an Alien language that we must learn to go to collage ....
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We all have common sense, but common sense tells us that if we have a 1:100 odd of winning then it will take 100 giveaways to win, on average. I've seen this kind of things said a couple of time on this forum, more often than I've seen someone who can do the real calculation, which is why I was impressed.
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That 100 average is actually correct, though.
Let's define P(x) to be the probability that you'll make your first win on exactly the xth giveaway. Given a fixed 100 entries per giveaway, P(x) is easy to calculate: P(x) = (99/100)^(x-1)(1/100). Now, the number of giveaways it takes to win is at least one, but there's no upper limit. There's a P(1) chance it'll take 1 giveaway, a P(2) chance it'll take 2 giveaways, a P(1,000,000) chance it'll take a 1,000,000 giveaways, etc. If we take P(x) x, and sum that over all positive integers x, we get the expected number of giveaways it'll take in order to win once.
To no great surprise, the result is 100. So if there's a 1/100 chance of winning each time, you'll get your first win in an average of 100 giveaways.
This does not mean that you'll definitely get it within 100, it does not mean that your chance to win a given giveaway ever changes, and it does not mean that people are somehow prevented from winning before the 100 mark. Those would be incorrect interpretations of the result. The actual result, however, is correct.
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Someone who can do maths and by the looks of several replies on here, blind people into thinking they are getting better chance to win per entry xD.
All entries are independent meaning that the maths in the post, although numerically correct, is wrong. your chance to win any giveaway is 1/x where x = number of final entrants and has nothing what-so-ever to do with the number of giveaways you have entered.
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Neato. Except you forgot to include an option to show that there were more than 1 copies being given away in a single giveaway.
Anyways... 105 contests, average chance 0.02%, and 0 wins thus far. Although at least one or two dozen of mine had to have been 2-3 or more copies being given away.
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Oh, and you could also add in the date that each entry was submitted, and then do some simple calculations to figure out approximately how many days will it be until they win something.
Something like... 100 / (percentage win chance per contest entries submitted per day) = how many days before you win.
So 100 / (0.02% per entry 2 entrys made a day) = 2500 days
Of course, this feature would only be used if someone actually put in the dates on all their entries (or maybe you can just let them override that and put an approximate, i.e. just let them say they enter 4x a day... so they don't have to mark the specific dates for hundreds of entries).
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For some reason, this sentence is the first thing my eyes landed on.
What that means for YOU, Billy, is that for every contest you enter, your chances to win the next one edge a weeeeeeee bit up a notch.
And that's where I stopped reading...
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a few sentences later reads:
"The reality is the chance for you to win is reset with every contest. A contest of 100 entries still means you have just 1% chance to win, regardless, but this is just a fun little tool to mess with."
and as my wormy friend clarified, the tool just looks at the whole, like coin flips, your chance to win at least 1 increases with every flip. it does, however, have no relation to your individual chance, that's still 50%, but if you look at it from afar, then you could say "if I flip the coin x many times, I have a y chance to win at least once". that's where statistics and probability can get sticky, cause you can have 2 or more numbers governing your chances while the only one that really matters is that individual flip.
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In your case, I would shift my eyes to certain thread and try to hug the lady Luck.
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lol i calculated all that stuff too ^^ i just took 2000 entrys for each giveaway as an average:
345 giveaway entered : the chance to win exactly 1 giveaway: 14.53 % (which i actually did yay :D)
the chance to win 2 or more giveaways with that stats: a whooping 1.32 %
that leaves the chance to win absolutely nothing: 84.15 %
man i just love to calculate random stuff :D
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I calculated my odds for all of my entries in the last week (too lazy to type in any further back then that) at 47.11%.
So yay, I had a slightly less then 50/50 chance of winning over the past week.
That seems pretty good, though I was entering a larger number of giveaways with 20-30 entries then I do usually.
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I'm surprised that there is still someone who is searching for an answer in math... It wil not help. You can win in the very first giveaway. Also, you can enter 1000+ giveaways and never win. Not any math will help you buddy. Luck. Only luck...
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Eh it sounds like you're committing Gambler's fallacy. The chances to win are independent so aren't really affected if you lost a lot. Statistics sure there is a higher chance to win at least once if you enter 2000 giveaways compared to 1000 giveaways, but saying if you haven't won in your first 1000 entries you have higher chances to win in your next 1000 isn't really true.
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So I see this a lot around these parts; folks asking "I entered 1000 contests, when will I win?" or "why does this guy have 500 entries and 100 wins?" etc... A fair question I suppose, though a bit baiting for many oldtimers here, so why don't you win, eh? What makes some folks win 5 in a row their first week here and others are into their thousands of entries with no luck? Well, Billy... I can call you Billy right? Well, it's just that! LUCK!
But luck is such an ugly term. Seems so flighty. So how bout we use the word "statistics" instead and call in some of his buddies, probability and chance!
First off, the whole "how does this guy win so much" issue. I've seen a few guys here that have an astounding win rate. Or so it seems! If you look at the people with higher than expected win ratios, you'll find that the contests they enter into have only about 10-20 entries! 10 entries means you have a 10% chance to win! That's fantastically high odds! Better odds than handing out your phone number on the street and getting a date odds. Well, that is if you look like me anyways... Moving on...
While objectively, you can say anything you enter is just a chance to win or fail, the number of other people who enter wildly effects the probability of your success. So if you have, again, 10 entries into a contest, that's 10% chance to win; 100 entries is 1% chance, and 1000 is .1% chance... When you start talking 2000-5000 entries into a single contest then well, I think some epic rare loots in WoW have better drop ratios. Still... all things considered, you have an enormously greater chance of winning something here than say the Lottery.
But you all know this jazz and I'm sure you don't want to listen to me babble and rant on and on... So here's the bread and butter; "when will I win?"!!! Well Billy, it all comes down to sample size and number of samples... Or another way, how many contests you enter and how big they are. Someone that enters 100 contests of 1000+ entries has a less chance to win than a guy that enters 100 contests with only 50 entries or less! So how do you figure out when your time comes? Math! Take a coin for instance. No not mine, I'm poor. But flip your own once. Chance of a heads is .50 or 50%. Flip it again and we do some fancy pants mathy dance and now you have a 75% chance of getting a heads! Look at that! Your chances just went up! Again and it's 87.5%. Keep going and it will inch closer and closer to 100% but never really get there.
What that means for YOU, Billy, is that for every contest you enter, your chances to win the next one edge a weeeeeeee bit up a notch. Sure, math is funny and can be skewed by entering a few smaller contests, but it gives you a good idea about how you're doing in the realm of probabilities. (the actual math is kind of simple, just subtract 1 by 1 divided by the number of entries and multiply it by the next contest and the next and next... then subtract 1 by all that and times by 10 and you get a nice percentage.)
But uh, you don't want to really be doing math now... So I made a spreadsheet for it! It only goes up to 1000, but it's mostly there to give you an idea. Now, this is all just fancy number play so it's not like it'll say you've got an 80% chance to win and you will... you just uh, have the odds stacked in your favor for it. The reality is the chance for you to win is reset with every contest. A contest of 100 entries still means you have just 1% chance to win, regardless, but this is just a fun little tool to mess with. (also, the field labeled "Individual Ave." is the real best way to see where you stand... it's just a little more depressing) So there you have it! If someone asks "when will I win?", show them some formulas and hand them a calculator! Or just say "probably never, because the gods of luck hate you"... either way works.
So without further delay:
SteamGifts Chance 2 Win.xls
I did it with Open Office so I'd suggest using that. I locked the sheet to prevent accidents but the password is password.
Oh, and shameless plug, visit my site!
Coffin-Comics.com
Enjoy! ALSO: It might be fun to post what your current "when will I win percentage"! Mine's at 8.8% Not bad... not bad...
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