http://almostrandom.com/dietbet/winnings-oct14.jpg
Note: to fully view this image, right click on it and choose "View Image". It should then be full-sized, but it will open in place of this blog post. So open a second window with this post in it to read them side-by-side.
Now that all the October rounds have been finalized, here's my winnings data for all Transformers.
The top section is the $$ won in each round. The columns are each game with the date that they start each round (ex: Jan 7 - started Jan 7, each round starts on the 7th). The stake that players put per round is at the left, so you can compare to see how big prizes actually are. The Round 6 stake is a little less for pre-pays so that's why there are two amounts there. If you only win the final round, then you'd really want to compare the total stake to the Round 6 pot to see if you'd win more than the stake at the end. The average winnings per round is at the right, but not the last column (see below). We had two Transformers end in October, with drastically different results. The April 8 game had a much higher prize than average (particularly in Round 6), while the April 22 game had a much lower prize than average. The other useful thing to note is that so far, DietBet has not had to use the "No Lose Guarantee" for Transformers. In every game, the 6th Round prize has been more than $150, so that means that even if someone only managed to make the 10% by the very end, they still got all their money back and then some.
The last column in the table is a special section for the Sept 16 High Stakes game. Because the stake is double the normal game, I think the behavior of this group will be significantly different from the rest of the games so I didn't think it right to include it in the averages. However, I still want to track it, so I stuck it at the right. If they start more high stakes Transformers, I'll track them together. Since they've only completed one round, it's far too early to make a lot of comments about performance. I predicted that they would have a much more committed player base and that has borne out with the Round 1 results - the %age of winners is much higher than any normal Transformer. As a result, the prize is actually less. Remember, the stake per round is $25 ($50 with half going to the final pot), so the prize share was only $0.19 per player. Given that it's closer to $4 in the regular games, these people have to really enjoy their weight loss because they're not in it for they money.
The 2nd section shows a running prize total by round. This is where you can see the effects of games where some rounds are stronger than others. If you look at the two recently finished March games, you'll see that compared to the average totals, the players who managed to win every round were really pulling ahead by the middle of the game. However, the April games were at or behind the average.
The 3rd section shows the percentage of players that won each round. Prize amounts per player are actually based on this, rather than how big any specific pot is, so you'll see that amounts are about the same in any game when the % of winners is about the same. Above the column, I showed the number of players that started the game, but use this as a guide only - the % numbers are based on the number of players that contributed to a specific pot, which goes down each round (see next section). For the games that finished, note Round 6: There's a super high %age of winners of this round because they eliminate anyone who didn't make the 6% goal by that round (see discussion at bottom). However, I added the "Overall" row that shows the percentage of winners based on the starting number. Also note, the average winning %age per round is at the right of this column.
It seems like the games are starting to reach a steady state now, with 55-60% of the players winning the first round for a prize share of about $16.50. In Round 2, the range is 30-35% for a prize share around $30. In Rounds 3 and 4, the averages are between 25-30% with Round 4 being slightly lower than Round 3, for prizes around $35. Round 5, the range is also 25-30%, but slightly higher than Round 4 because people playing "slow but steady" are starting to catch up as the goals aren't as far apart. Round 5 prizes also average lower than Round 4 prizes, but still hover around $35. Round 6 tends to have about 83% of qualifiers win. However, the prizes vary a lot more because the final pot has a lot of extra money in it from players played the early rounds but didn't even make it to Round 5. The attrition varies widely per game and so this isn't something I've found a good way to characterize yet.
The fourth section is the number of players per round who contributed to the pot. Here you can start to see the attrition per round, but I'll talk more about that in another post. The fifth section is the number of winners per round. Here's where you can really see what I've been saying that prize amounts don't much depend on how many players are in a game (and thus how big the pot is). There were 2x as many players in the early March game as in the late March game and thus the total round pot was 2x as big. But they had nearly the same %age of winners and thus, nearly identical prize amounts. In fact, the smaller late March game had a slightly lower percentage of winners so they had a slightly larger prize than the early March game despite the smaller pot.
Finally, at the very bottom is a focus on Round 6 qualification. The first row shows the number of Round 1 pot contributors, the 2nd row shows Round 5 pot contributors, and the 3rd row shows the number of players that qualified for Round 6 by meeting the 6% loss metric. This is a higher number than won Round 5 in the respective games. The "Overall R6 Qual %" is the percentage of Round 1 players who qualified for the final round. The "R5-R6 Qual %" is the percentage of Round 5 players that qualified for Round 6. Before the May games reached Round 6, we had enough games to make it this far now to confidently say that about 35-40% of the Round 5 players qualify for Round 6, and about 30-33% of the initial players make it that far. However, the May players had the more trouble sticking with the game and meeting the goals, so their numbers are lower than these. However, those games are also on track to yield the largest Round 6 prizes we've seen so far.