Tombola question for today

[Expiry]

We have a tombola at work today, for Comic relief.

There are 500 tickets and about 50 prizes. Clearly, there's more chance of picking a non-winning ticket than a winning ticket.

Assuming this is the case for everyone that has a go, am I better off having a go early, whilst allt he prizes are still to be won or should I wait for statistics to take their course on the first few people so that there'll be less non-winning tickets for me to choose from?

 

[Richard Schollar]

Depends whether the relative proportions of non-winning to winning tickets changes across the day I would have thought

Also whether there is a particular prize you are interested in - cos if that goes early, maybe you won't want to buy a ticket at all?

 

[Jon von der Heyden]

How much are the tickets selling for and what is the combined value of the prizes?

 

[Expiry]

The tickets are £1 for 5 and the combined value of the prizes is probably about £100.

 

[Expiry]

I should also point out that one of the prizes is endorsed by Mensa - the IQ Society and it's called

"The Worlds Greatest Brainteasers".

I'm not sure how many worlds Mensa have a presence in.

 

[Jon von der Heyden]

The tickets are £1 for 5 and the combined value of the prizes is probably about £100.

Bummer! I once allocated a budget for something similar. I gave them £500 to buy prizes and they spent the lot. The total tickets only came to about £200.

 

[WaterGypsy]

In an honest tombola it shouldn't make any difference because statistically the odds remain the same throughout the day .....

... .. .. on the other hand if you monitor the draw and notice that proportinately less prizes are being won early on then it would make sense to delay purchase until late in the day.

(As regards honest I used to know a church going chap who ran the tombola in the xmas fayre who always held back tickets for a couple of top prizes until late in the day to make sure people kept buying tickets)

(And there could be an anomaly in the 'luck' of the draw resulting in only winning tickets being drawn at the beginning of the day)

 

[Expiry]

If there are 10 times more losing tickets than there are winning ones, do you think there's genuinely the same chance of winning whether there are 2 winners or 2,000?

I know, the maths says so, but in reality trying to pick a winner in a bucket with 20,000 losing tickets seems more unlikely than from a bucket with just 20.