Wednesday, February 14, 2018

Some basic math skills were in order

There's 185 cards left on my 1974 Topps want list.  If I thought of that before I sat down last night to put the cards I had into pages, I wouldn't have expected to have more complete pages when I started.

Here's where the basic math skills come into play.

660 cards divided by 9 (cards per page) equals 73 pages + 3 cards on a 74th page.

With 185 cards to go, basic math of 185/73 pages equals almost 2.5 cards per page that aren't in hand yet.  That's a lot of chances for a page to be missing cards; and very few chances for any of the pages to be completed.

I think by the end of the paging, I had 5 complete pages.   Not bad...


Also running through the cards I have, there were some big names that I didn't see.   Pete Rose.  Nolan Ryan.  Dave Winfield (his 2nd year card).  Dave Parker's RC. 

After a while when you have a boat load of numbers on a blog that form some kind of want list, you forget to sit down and dig into what players are needed to get rid of those numbers.  It's the same for the majority of the sets I'm putting together right now.

Rickey Henderson RC.   Ken Griffey Jr RC.  Bob Gibson RC.  Nolan Ryan RC.  I could go on for a while.   It looks and sounds like a daunting task.    So far in 2018, I haven't thought of it that way.

Why?

It's because I'm happy that I'm following one of my New Years resolutions.

For 45 days, I haven't hit Wal Mart or Target at all.  No trips to the card aisle.  Not one pack of new product.  Not one thought about new product.   I haven't even got the shakes yet....

Just 45 days to go to take care of one resolution.

Thanks for reading, Robert

6 comments:

  1. Congratulations on making it 45 days with a trip to the card aisle. I've stopped by a few times, but haven't purchased any 2018 products... yet. I did buy a 2017 Topps factory set though.

    Btw... I'm pretty sure that the 1974 Topps Winfield is his rookie card.

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    1. Yep, you're right, got my years confused. The Winfield RC is 74.

      Thanks for catching that!

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  2. Yeah nice job. I've adamantly decided to get a factory set of 2018 this year, but still fight the urge to go into Target for packs.

    I'll peruse my '74 dupes and see if I can whittle your list down some more.

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    1. Sounds good Greg, much appreciated.

      Also thank you for the binders offer the other day, but I had some Amazon Cash to burn which made it really cheap to have them sent my way.

      Delete
  3. Hi Robert,
    Some less-basic math would let us calculate how many pages of each number to expect. This uses the "Binomial Distribution." You have 72% of the set complete, so we can assume that each pocket has a 72% chance of being filled. Based on that, here is how many pages of each "fullness" that we would expect out of 73:
    Cards/Page Pages (of 73)
    9 3.8
    8 13.3
    7 20.7
    6 18.8
    5 11.0
    4 4.3
    3 1.1
    2 0.2
    1 0.0
    0 0.0

    You would expect between 3-4 pages to be completely full, so your 5 is not entirely unexpected...but it is better than average! :-)
    I'm curious what was your lowest amount that you had in any page? These numbers suggest you would have 1 page with only 3.
    Fun stuff! --Josh D.

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    1. Goodness gracious I'd forgotten about binomial distribution. haven't used that in decades.

      I believe the lowest page was 3 (I'm typing from a location away from my cards at the moment), and I'm pretty sure that I didn't have any pages with 0 or 1 cards.

      Great stuff!! Thanks for posting.

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