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Sunday, January 1, 2012

Where's George Predictions for 2012

For a few years now, I've been massively addicted to Where's George. For the past two, I've set goals for what I wish to "accomplish" within the year even though the majority of the goals are "out of my control" (I have no control over how often/where my entered bills get hit although indirectly that's affected by how many bills I enter and where I spend them). Historically my goals have been pretty bad (too easy/hard) even though I attempt to base them on math.

To compensate for that this year, I plan to make predictions as well as goals for the year. The key factor to the predictions is bills entered per day, so if I get that factor wrong, my predictions will all be way off. My history of accurately forecasting that value has not been good. In 2009, I predicted 7.64 and actually entered 10.44. For 2010, I predicted 10.22 but entered 10.64. Last year, I predicted 11.54 and entered 15.57. So other than 2010, my bills per day goal was way out of whack the past three years.

So I'll start things off by going with a high bills per day target of 13.66. How did I come upon that number? Hitting that would make for 5000 bills entered in 2012. This is less bills than I entered in 2011 but more than 2010. This feels like it's going to be high, but I can change my forecast as the year goes on. Based on that, I created a program to predict the total number of hits I would receive based on past hits, past entries, and expected entry rate. That program predicted that I would receive 1231 hits in 2012 for a total of 4030 hits overall. This will raise my slugging percentage to 18.55% (currently 16.74%). Using that information, I created an Excel spreadsheet to attempt to determine how many of those hits would be the initial hit on a bill. Based on those calculations, I predict 1015 new initial bill hits raising my bills with hits total to 3445 resulting in a hit rate of 15.86% (up from 14.53%).

Bingos are a lot harder to predict, so much of this won't be based on math. In regards to 50 State bingo, I'm two States away: West Virginia and Mississippi. I picked up 6 States in 2011 which was more than I expected. Regardless, I'm going to go for broke and predict that I'll get hits in both West Virginia and Mississippi in 2012. California County Bingo was a lot less successful for me: I started the year with hits in 51 of the 58 counties and only picked up 1 county. I see no reason why that will get any better, so I'm predicting 1 additional county in 2012. I currently have 40 FRB bingos. Expecting these to increase at the same rate as Bills with Hits would result in me having 57 at the end of 2012. As for block letter bingo, I just need W, X, and Y. I'm not getting a lot of bills with these block letters (just 2 X's in 2011 and none of the others), so I'll predict that no progress will be made.

I had 19 hitless days in 2011 which was much better than my goal of 35. Based on my expected number of hits in 2012 (and again using Excel), I calculate the odds of a day being hitless at 3.45% meaning I'll probably have a hitless day every 29.0 days for an expected 12.6 hitless days during the year.

My longest hit streak was 79 days (April 13th through June 30th). I used Excel to help predict whether or not that streak is beat. Assuming that I will only have 13 hitless days in 2012, I randomly picked which days will be hitless and then checked to see how often an 80 day or greater streak would be reached (using the fact that I'm coming into the year with a 4 day hit streak). I did 50,000 simulations with nearly 10,000 thrown out because duplicate days were chosen to be hitless. Of the remaining simulations, 52.0% included an 80 day hit streak. So it's pretty much a 50/50 bet. Regardless, I'm going to go ahead and predict that the current record will fall.

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