BOTB - rigged?
Discussion
I've never really thought about it before, because I don't play BOTB*, but isn't the below the best strategy of "winning" assuming you are confident of getting within the inner circle most of the time;
Buy 100 tickets, but make sure you place them in 50 groups of 2. Each group you choose two pixels next to each other. This means that you will automatically beat Joe Bloggs, who has done the normal thing of splitting his 3 guesses over a wider window, if you correctly get the right pixel.
If you pick the right week, and I think some are more obvious (where a set of judges will pick a smaller area) than others, you have an OK chance. If you don't win, you might get 50% of your tickets back as freebies. Rinse / repeat for 10 gameweeks and I reckon you might be in (I could be miles out with 10 gameweeks!).
Call it 1000 tickets over 10 weeks, and you pay for 500. Average ticket cost a £5 perhaps. £2,500.
You can tweak the maths to make it more scientific/realistic I suppose. You can probably work out the amount of pixels in the inner circle by choosing a fair few in a straight line one week to try and work out the diameter. Then its a more numbers game as to whether it makes sense.
With this competition, sometimes someone will get lucky and they spend less than £50 a year, but I reckon the vast majority are done by serial "pickers."
Buy 100 tickets, but make sure you place them in 50 groups of 2. Each group you choose two pixels next to each other. This means that you will automatically beat Joe Bloggs, who has done the normal thing of splitting his 3 guesses over a wider window, if you correctly get the right pixel.
If you pick the right week, and I think some are more obvious (where a set of judges will pick a smaller area) than others, you have an OK chance. If you don't win, you might get 50% of your tickets back as freebies. Rinse / repeat for 10 gameweeks and I reckon you might be in (I could be miles out with 10 gameweeks!).
Call it 1000 tickets over 10 weeks, and you pay for 500. Average ticket cost a £5 perhaps. £2,500.
You can tweak the maths to make it more scientific/realistic I suppose. You can probably work out the amount of pixels in the inner circle by choosing a fair few in a straight line one week to try and work out the diameter. Then its a more numbers game as to whether it makes sense.
With this competition, sometimes someone will get lucky and they spend less than £50 a year, but I reckon the vast majority are done by serial "pickers."
- I've played about 5 times in 10 years, with free tickets!
Edited by Jon_Bmw on Monday 11th January 16:01
I've just looked back at my picks and revise my comment, I don't think you would get all picks in the inner circle!
ETA: I think the inner circle is approximately a diameter of 64 pixels. So the possible picks in the inner circle is 3200 pixels, which is quite a few. Say you managed to get 50 in per week with 100 tickets which is probably very ambitious, that gives you a 1.5% chance of picking the outright winning pixel.
Maybe its more like 25 in the inner circle if that. But you don't always have to get the exact pixel, so perhaps that offsets it.
Interesting, and now someone far cleverer than me can probably tell me I am a millions miles out.
ETA: I think the inner circle is approximately a diameter of 64 pixels. So the possible picks in the inner circle is 3200 pixels, which is quite a few. Say you managed to get 50 in per week with 100 tickets which is probably very ambitious, that gives you a 1.5% chance of picking the outright winning pixel.
Maybe its more like 25 in the inner circle if that. But you don't always have to get the exact pixel, so perhaps that offsets it.
Interesting, and now someone far cleverer than me can probably tell me I am a millions miles out.
Edited by Jon_Bmw on Monday 11th January 16:30
Jon_Bmw said:
I've just looked back at my picks and revise my comment, I don't think you would get all picks in the inner circle!
ETA: I think the inner circle is approximately a diameter of 64 pixels. So the possible picks in the inner circle is 3200 pixels, which is quite a few. Say you managed to get 50 in per week with 100 tickets which is probably very ambitious, that gives you a 1.5% chance of picking the outright winning pixel.
Maybe its more like 25 in the inner circle if that. But you don't always have to get the exact pixel, so perhaps that offsets it.
Interesting, and now someone far cleverer than me can probably tell me I am a millions miles out.
But... how often do you even get a punt in that inner circle? For me, I reckon I'm in Zone 2 maybe 1 week in 6 and Zone 1, 1 week in 26 ETA: I think the inner circle is approximately a diameter of 64 pixels. So the possible picks in the inner circle is 3200 pixels, which is quite a few. Say you managed to get 50 in per week with 100 tickets which is probably very ambitious, that gives you a 1.5% chance of picking the outright winning pixel.
Maybe its more like 25 in the inner circle if that. But you don't always have to get the exact pixel, so perhaps that offsets it.
Interesting, and now someone far cleverer than me can probably tell me I am a millions miles out.
I just checked. I have done 4 tickets over 3 games. Great sample size, ha!!! 1 in zone 1, 3 in zone 2.
Hopefully some serial players can give their feedback. I would always think I could get them in zone 2 or better if you chose the weeks you played carefully, unfortunately zone 2 only pays back 15%.
Hopefully some serial players can give their feedback. I would always think I could get them in zone 2 or better if you chose the weeks you played carefully, unfortunately zone 2 only pays back 15%.
Jon_Bmw said:
I just checked. I have done 4 tickets over 3 games. Great sample size, ha!!! 1 in zone 1, 3 in zone 2.
Hopefully some serial players can give their feedback. I would always think I could get them in zone 2 or better if you chose the weeks you played carefully, unfortunately zone 2 only pays back 15%.
No, Zone 1 is 100% refund, Zone 2 is 50%.Hopefully some serial players can give their feedback. I would always think I could get them in zone 2 or better if you chose the weeks you played carefully, unfortunately zone 2 only pays back 15%.
I just had a look at BOTB football thingy.. I'm quite strange to any of these but please explain;
- So there is supposed to be a missing ball, and you gotta be guessing the exact location.
- But the location of the missing ball is actually set by several -independent judges- who are not that qualified for this? (I mean by qualified this is purely geometry and photographic analysis, in advance levels)
So the odds of you pick somewhere super precise, and the judges decision completely bonkers!? I can not see the incentive to play really, if this was judged against the "actual" location of the ball, than you would have some interesting chances.. Than of course the issue for BOTB, how would they conceal the actual moment of that players, by maybe trying to lose the uniforms and etc.. (unless some lunatic fan has watched all the mili-seconds of football games in the last 20 years, which is quite possible!)
Anyway, enjoy the game and being taxed by BOTB all I could add.
- So there is supposed to be a missing ball, and you gotta be guessing the exact location.
- But the location of the missing ball is actually set by several -independent judges- who are not that qualified for this? (I mean by qualified this is purely geometry and photographic analysis, in advance levels)
So the odds of you pick somewhere super precise, and the judges decision completely bonkers!? I can not see the incentive to play really, if this was judged against the "actual" location of the ball, than you would have some interesting chances.. Than of course the issue for BOTB, how would they conceal the actual moment of that players, by maybe trying to lose the uniforms and etc.. (unless some lunatic fan has watched all the mili-seconds of football games in the last 20 years, which is quite possible!)
Anyway, enjoy the game and being taxed by BOTB all I could add.
ooid said:
I just had a look at BOTB football thingy.. I'm quite strange to any of these but please explain;
- So there is supposed to be a missing ball, and you gotta be guessing the exact location.
- But the location of the missing ball is actually set by several -independent judges- who are not that qualified for this? (I mean by qualified this is purely geometry and photographic analysis, in advance levels)
So the odds of you pick somewhere super precise, and the judges decision completely bonkers!? I can not see the incentive to play really, if this was judged against the "actual" location of the ball, than you would have some interesting chances.. Than of course the issue for BOTB, how would they conceal the actual moment of that players, by maybe trying to lose the uniforms and etc.. (unless some lunatic fan has watched all the mili-seconds of football games in the last 20 years, which is quite possible!)
Anyway, enjoy the game and being taxed by BOTB all I could add.
Why is picking 1 pixel out of a few tens of thousand likely ones any worse than playing the Euromillions where your choice is out of 75 million possibilities?- So there is supposed to be a missing ball, and you gotta be guessing the exact location.
- But the location of the missing ball is actually set by several -independent judges- who are not that qualified for this? (I mean by qualified this is purely geometry and photographic analysis, in advance levels)
So the odds of you pick somewhere super precise, and the judges decision completely bonkers!? I can not see the incentive to play really, if this was judged against the "actual" location of the ball, than you would have some interesting chances.. Than of course the issue for BOTB, how would they conceal the actual moment of that players, by maybe trying to lose the uniforms and etc.. (unless some lunatic fan has watched all the mili-seconds of football games in the last 20 years, which is quite possible!)
Anyway, enjoy the game and being taxed by BOTB all I could add.
V8mate said:
Why is picking 1 pixel out of a few tens of thousand likely ones any worse than playing the Euromillions where your choice is out of 75 million possibilities?
I have never played euromillions. I always though BOTB fans are usually somehow people with football knowledge, being fans and etc...but after looking at this in detail, it is totally irrelevant imho.rich12 said:
I've never really looked at BOTB but how are their images created?
Photoshop 2 images together? take a real photo, edit out the ball or something else?
It doesn't really matter, you aren't actually playing for where the ball has been removed from.Photoshop 2 images together? take a real photo, edit out the ball or something else?
You are playing against the guess of a panel of judges.
V8mate said:
Why is picking 1 pixel out of a few tens of thousand likely ones any worse than playing the Euromillions where your choice is out of 75 million possibilities?
Also when you are picking your spot it zooms in where your mouse is, so you never get to see the image as 1. So it kind of puts you off where you are wanting to actually drop your ball as well.DonkeyApple said:
They use the 'Game of Skill' legislation for spot the ball to get around not coming under the Gaming Act on one side and the raffle rules re free entries. Or at least they used to. It is quite some years since I looked at all this stuff. We were going to launch a business in 2008 so spent quite a bit of money building the legal framework. We had a nice deal with several premier league football clubs among others. What actually stopped us from launching back then was that payment gateways wouldn't take the business back then and the ones that did carried large chargeback penalties. The reason why the industry has exploded in the last two years is that this problem has gone away with the arrival of new payment services and a relaxing of rules by existing ones.
What will happen within the next year or so is that a change of law will be brought about to regulate the repeat game side of this, probably to bring it under the Gaming Act. The work on this is already underway as we dusted off our plans last year but advice from a couple of the big law firms led us to believe that we would have too short a time window to build the business to a large enough scale to be able to easily adapt to the likely regulatory changes that would be appearing.
Thats interesting to hear. We looked into a similar business around 2 years ago, heck I used to sell advertising space to one of the main ones, back in its younger days. The regulatory side always seemed rather wishy washy though, and open to extra regulation as its quite big business now, but with quite shady business practices. Especially given how frowned upon gambling is now, yet these raffles seem to be open game for tactics which large traditional gambling firms would get crucified for.What will happen within the next year or so is that a change of law will be brought about to regulate the repeat game side of this, probably to bring it under the Gaming Act. The work on this is already underway as we dusted off our plans last year but advice from a couple of the big law firms led us to believe that we would have too short a time window to build the business to a large enough scale to be able to easily adapt to the likely regulatory changes that would be appearing.
Things seem to be going ok for them.
Elsewhere there was another guidance upgrade from Best of the Best, the host of online supercar competitions. The company, which used to run the games from airports, lucked out with its move online last year. In the six months to the end of October profits rose fivefold to £6.8 million and that momentum has continued, meaning that full-year profits will "materially exceed management expectations".
(Source: The Times Business Briefing)
Elsewhere there was another guidance upgrade from Best of the Best, the host of online supercar competitions. The company, which used to run the games from airports, lucked out with its move online last year. In the six months to the end of October profits rose fivefold to £6.8 million and that momentum has continued, meaning that full-year profits will "materially exceed management expectations".
(Source: The Times Business Briefing)
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