One of my favorite games during the Super Bowl is the 100-square box game. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s an example:
The premise is simple: a square with 100 boxes is drawn, and random numbers from 0-9 are filled in across and down. Everyone pitches in a buck and you get a square. If the score at the end of each quarter ends in your numbers (last number in the score of each team), you win $25.
What is the probability of winning based on my numbers?
That’s an interesting question, and there are many ways to answer it. One could look at recent Super Bowl results to assign a probability. From Print Your Brackets.com…
- The number 0 appeared 99 times – 27.50%
- The number 7 appeared 75 times – 20.83%
- The number 3 appeared 56 times – 15.56%
- The number 4 appeared 38 times – 10.56%
- The number 6 appeared 30 times – 8.33%
- The number 1 appeared 20 times – 5.56%
- The number 9 appeared 15 times – 4.17%
- The number 2 appeared 9 times – 2.50%
- The number 8 appeared 9 times – 2.50%
- The number 5 appeared 9 times – 2.50%
- Takeaways: double-zero is king, and any combo of 0, 7, and 3 is gold
However, this methodology does not take into account current factors. The Wall Street Journal ran scenario analysis on the New York Giants and New England Patriots and came up with the following matrix:
- Takeaways: In this scenario, double-zero is still king, but 0-7, 0-3, and 7-0 are close runners up
Unfortunately, in either scenario, if you’re sitting on the double-2, the double-5 or the double-8, you’re screwed
As you may know, I posted my strategy for picking College Football Bowl winners. I broke them down into several categories:
- Home Teams
- Playing Absent Coaches
- Playing Little Sisters of the Poor
- Better Records Last year
- Playing teams I watched Lay Eggs throughout the year
- Toss Ups
Turns out one strategy was superior to the others: Teams playing absent coaches
Teams playing others with their coach either getting fired or leaving for another opportunity were vastly superior bets vs. the spread this year. If you picked solely against absent coaches, you would have gone 6-of-7, and would have lost the 7th game by 0.5 points.
One other strategy played out the opposite of what I expected: Little Sisters of the Poor went 2-0 against big conferences.
The rest of the strategies were break-even at best. Betting on the home team yielded a 56% win %, and toss ups were indeed toss-ups (50%). Teams playing ones I considered “Egg Layers” went 2-1, but the small sample size was not convincing.
So next year, when you’re formulating your Bowl pool, pick against the teams that lost their coach, and steer clear of the rest.
USPS recently announced that two of the three Bellevue Post Offices will consolidate into a new location that is yet to be determined. I wondered, based on user rankings, what is the best post office in Bellevue, and is it closing?
Based on personal experience, the Downtown Bellevue Post Office never has a line shorter than 5 deep. The Midlakes branch (116th) has been relatively quiet, and the Crossroads branch is generally more calm than downtown, but out of the way.
But I wanted to use an objective rating, so leveraged ratings within Google Maps.
Based on pretty good sample sizes (27 total rankings, 5 or more for each), Crossroads comes out on top, with a rating of 3-out-of-5-stars. Downtown Bellevue registered 2-of-5. And Midlakes has a paltry 1.5-of-5 stars.
So, it looks like the USPS is making the right decision in closing the 2 lowest-performing post offices in town. And next time you have to mail a package, it might be worth driving the extra distance to Crossroads.
