Probably the most common Super Bowl Office Pool is the ubiquitous Super Bowl Board (Bored?). The 10x10 grid where there are 100 spots and for a fixed amount ($1?) you can buy one of these spots. The $100 (100 spots x $1) jackpot goes to person who puts his or her name in the lucky square. Anyone familiar with football knows that are good numbers to have (0,7,3), and there are poor numbers to have (2,5,9). But does anyone know just how good or bad these numbers are? Well, I have some statistics: So far there has been 266 NFL games including the playoffs. The results:
1 = 10.9%, 2 = 2.6%, 3 = 13.9%, 4 = 14.1%, 5 = 4.1%,
6 = 7.0%, 7 = 17.5%, 8 = 5.8%, 9 = 5.8%, 0 = 18.2%
IMO, a better game would be summing the digits: Examples a score of 24 = 6, a score of 28 = 0, and 39 would be equal to 2. In this case, the frequency of the same 266 games looks like this
1=8.3%, 2=8.8%, 3=12.8%, 4=11.3%, 5=11.1%
6=9.8%, 7=11.3%, 8=10.5%, 9=7.9%, 0=8.3%
IMO, this is a fairer distribution I have never seen anyone else do the board this way. Any thoughts?
By the way, the top 10 scores are 20-17-24-13-27-10-21-23-31-14
Jackpots are sometimes divided into quarterly and halftime scores. I counted only the final scores because the final score jackpot is larger and if quarterly scores are counted, I believe the good numbers distribution would be more heavily skewed.[ul]
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