Hey ,

Today’s post is all about your odds of winning in The Gradient Games and how you can create your own luck by riding more. Ok, let’s dive in!

What are my odds of winning?

One of the things we’re most excited about with The Gradient Games is how all players who ride even just a single km have a chance of winning, but the active rider is rewarded through increased odds. Let’s look at how your odds are calculated with a simple example, using just two players.

Game Example

Alice & Bob are players in a game.

Alice has a particularly heavy training week and puts in 260km, with a total elevation gain of 3,000m. Bob, on the other hand, keeps things rolling during the week with a daily commute of 10 km each way, Monday → Friday (100km overall), with a total elevation gain of 500m.

Game points are earned at a rate of 1 point per km (or per 0.62 miles) and 1 point per 25 meters (or per 82 ft) climbed.

The results then for our players are 380 points for Alice and 120 points for Bob, making a total of 500 points overall.

Calculating the odds

There are only two factors that define your odds of winning. The number of points YOU have earned, and the number of points ALL players have earned. Your odds are simply this first number divided by the second. In other words:

your_odds = your_points / total_points

What this means for our players, is that their odds (or probabilities) of winning are 76% for Alice (380 / 500) and 24% for Bob (120 / 500).

As you can see, because of the extra work Alice put in, her odds of winning are 3x higher than Bob’s. But it could still go either way, because a winner is drawn at random after the game based on the total points split. The post-game draw is kind of like a raffle, where your points are equivalent to tickets in the raffle, alongside tickets from all the other game players.

Summary

That’s it on how to calculate your odds. Simply divide the number of points you earn by the number of points everyone has earned, and that gives you your probability of winning the game.

In other words, the more you ride, the better your odds 🙌

Next time, we’ll look at what’s required to join a game and what you could win at the end of one.

Let’s grow the Games

I think you’ll all agree that playing games is always better with friends. So, if you know any other cyclists, please share this email with them and ask them to hit the button below to get in on the action and join the test programme 🙏

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading. If you did, please tell your friends. If you didn’t, tell them anyway but also tell me so I can do better next time! Thank you!!

Chris