I've been collecting caps for the every10minutes sweepstakes. Pepsi products have a code that can be used for a chance at winning an Xbox 360. You can enter one code for each drawing, or save your codes and put them all in a single drawing. At first glance, it seems you'd have a better chance of winning by putting all of your chances into one drawing. For example, if you have two codes and there were 500 entries per drawing, the probability of winning would be 2/500 instead of 2/1000. But the hidden assumption here is that everybody is probably saving them. So if you have 5 codes today in a 500 code drawing, your chance of winning is 1%. And if you save your codes until you have 50 along with everyone else, there will be a total of 5000 codes in each drawing, giving you 1% again. So it boils down to if you think you can outpace others in the accumulation of codes, then save them. If not, it might be wise to put as many as you can, say, every few days. For example, if your rate of increase is 50% more than the average increase, while everyone increases their 5 codes to 50, you'd have 75 codes, giving you a 1.5% chance of winning. But if you can only increase at 75% of the average increase, then you'd have a 0.75% chance of winning.
Just give me an Xbox 360.
2 comments:
I would personally base my submissions more on pepsi drinker / geek psychology. When are they most active and likely to submit? You want to submit when the mass submitters are not to increase your chances. Psychology is more important than numbers in this case!
Very true. As it turns out, the drawings between 1:00 and 3:00 AM have the least amount of entries. The site allows you to pick any drawing in the next 48 hours. I assumed people want to be awake to see if they won, as opposed to checking at a later time. I would have thought the 3:00 AM hour would have the least, taking into account time zones.
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