Projecting a Supercontest Winner
Written by Justin Zovas
The Las Vegas Hilton NFL SuperContest has been expanding for years and 2012 contest boasts a record number of entries. With the SuperContest’s growth in popularity, this year’s payouts are more lucrative than ever. The standard for NFL handicapping excellence has been raised and if math is any indication, this year’s champion will need to push the envelope. We hear all the time about the gold standard, a winning % it takes be successful as a professional bettor. For a contest where every contestant enters a level playing field, we used raw numbers to give us our projected magic number. Before anyone gets started and says “you can’t use math for this!” we’re well aware anomalies happen and someone very well may put together a 17 week run for the ages.
With this in mind, what would be more fun than to break down the contest using some math and statistics?
- Pick 5 games a week X 17 weeks = 85 total games
- n=85
- 50% chance to be correct, 50% to be incorrect (ignoring half point wins for pushes)
- p=.5
- Binomial Distribution based on n=85 and p=.5
- See graph below
- Expected Value=42.5 “wins”
- Normal distribution
- Mean, median, mode are all 42.5
- Half of contests expected to finish below 42.5, half above 42.5
- Normal distribution
- Variance= 21.25
- Standard Deviation=4.61
- Standard Deviations
- 68% of contestants will fall within one standard deviation of the mean
- 506.6 contestants will finished between 37.89 and 47.11 wins
- 68% of contestants will fall within one standard deviation of the mean
- 95% of contestants will fall within two standard deviations of the mean
- 707.75 contestants will finished between 33.28 and 51.72 wins
- 99.7% of contestants will fall within three standard deviations of the mean
- 742.77 contestants will finished between 28.67 and 56.33 win
- It is impossible to calculate, the wins needed to finish in the 100thpercentile because the normal curve approaches zero but never hits zero until n=85. Theoretically, one could win all 85 games he picks. Thus, we will calculate the wins needed to finish in the top two.
- (744/745) =.9987 (rounded to four decimals)
- Z-score =3.00172
- In order to finish in the top two (99.87 percentile), one has to finish with 56.34 wins or a 66.28% winning percentage
- Thus, the “magic number” to win this contest is 57 wins (.671) or winning roughly 2 out of every 3 games. Of course, the ultimate winner may exceed or fall short of this number but 57 is a good target number for those contestants who are near first place through 9 weeks.
- After 9 weeks, “There Will Be Blood” sits atop the ranks with 31.5 points. He is on pace to finish with 59.5 points but expect his results to regress slightly to the mean over the final half of the season.
