2024 is the fourth year in a row that the league has done its 12-day donation drive. Having been in the league since before 12 Days of Christmas was a thing, I'm proud to say that I've contributed to the annual charity every year we've run it, and that I really appreciate that the league has (allegedly) put our money to a good use.
So why haven't I won anything yet?
You see, out of every iteration of five winners, then five winners again, then three winners, then one winner, across four separate tiers of winning, exactly zero of the names drawn have been mine. Heck, the first year even featured ten winners in that first bracket, a fact that I'm sure the league hoped no one would notice when they cut that in half. It's because of this that I started my posting in this year's holiday threads with a complaint that the blue team was purposely avoiding giving me prizes, presumably because they hate me.
I decided I'd like to see what I could do to analyze that, so I went back to every previous holiday drive and found out:
How many people had replied to each day's thread
Whether I myself had entered in that drawing by replying to that thread
...and I did what I do best and put it in a spreadsheet that calculates the probability over time that I would have won at least one of the drawings up to this point, by taking that number for each tier of each drive and factoring in bonus draws from donation and the number of winners in each tier. What I found was:
Surprisingly, there was already at least a 10% chance that I would have won in the very first tier ever, based on the fact that there were 10 winners in that tier.
There was approximately a 15% chance that I would have won something in 2021 overall.
By the end of 2022, that number grew to a 28% chance that across the first two years, I would have won something at some point.
By the end of 2023, I had just over a 40% chance of having won anything at all across those three years.
So, it still isn't out of the question that I've lost year after year by chance. Should I not win anything this year, though, my cumulative chance will likely break 50%--meaning that it will have become more likely than not that I would have taken a prize.
So I'm not being cheated yet, but keep an eye out for all I might have to say next year if history repeats itself.