April 26th, 2006

Filed under:
Canada
4 Comments »

More Rollup the Rim to Win Data

For reasons I don’t entirely understand, my post on Tim Horton’s Roll Up the Rim to Win odds is (at least in RUTRTW season) one of the most popular pages on this site. You foreigners got no idea what I’m talking about? Ask Wikipedia about this Canadian coffee drinking institution.

I recently got an email from Brian G. Rudneski. He’s an engineer, and he’s been tracking the coffee drinking and contest winning habits of himself and a few friends:

Long story short, my coffee consumption doubles during RUTR and I’ve always bitched about not winning. This year I decided to keep stats during the entire contest to see what the true odds of winning are. Wouldn’t you know it, at this point we are at about .97 in 9 odds of winning after about 200 coffees.

He kindly sent along the spreadsheet he kept. With his permission, I’ve posted it to this site. His conclusions?

  • Odds of winning anything: 23 wins in 214 cups, or 10.7%
  • Stuff they won: 18 coffees and 5 doughnuts
  • Litres of coffee you should drink to win: 3.3 L

You may also be interested in this amusing Rick Mercer expose (MOV), which explains where in the country you need to be to win the RAV 4. British Columbians, you’re SOL.

Comments: 4 Responses so far

gillian
April 26th, 2006
1:27 pm

I won a donut. Though the coffee cup with the winning rim’s getting pretty gross after all these weeks of sitting here in my cubicle.

[Reply]

Jerry
February 27th, 2007
7:00 am

It’s RUTR time again! I just visited my friendly neigbourhood TH’s and got the “Please Play Again”. Aaargh!

Timmy Jorge 1 - Jerry 0 (in case anyone’s keeping score).

[Reply]

Mike
March 22nd, 2007
8:53 am

one error that i see in that spreadsheet is the fact that he also put “free cookies, free muffins” when there are only two food prizes, coffees and donuts. however, these prizes can be traded in for:

coffee -> any hot drink, any size
donut -> donut, cookie, bagel, danish, muffin

so i thought that was a little misleading, it looked like he only ever got 2 prizes out of the 6 different types

[Reply]

Renee
March 27th, 2007
8:14 am

I’ve been tracking since the beginning of the 07 campaign… I am 0 for 33 at this point.

This reveals to me, two issues:

1. I drink way too much coffee
2. I am incredibly unlucky.

[Reply]

Add a comment