Bunco

On Tuesdays here in Springhouse Village, it’s Bunco night.  You know.  Bunco.  That mindless little dice game designed as much to socialize as to amuse.  No … you don’t know it?   It is played with three dice.  You score points by trying to roll a particular number with the number progressing through 1 to 6 with each round.  Let’s say the number is 1.  You get one point for each 1 you roll and you get to keep rolling as long as you are scoring points.   If all three dice come up as the number, that is a Bunco and you score 21 points.   If all three dice come up any other number, that is a Funco and you get five points.  It is played with 2 two person teams at each table where the number of tables is determined by how many players turn up each week.  Now, the social part.  After each round, the winning team moves to another table … BUT you can’t stay partners with the same person.  So, in the course of an evening (we play three rounds, with the number going from 1 to 6 in each round), you get to spend some time with lots of different people.  Wikipedia says that the skills required to play Bunco are counting and simple mathematics.  Indeed.

That’s Odd(s)

courtesy USA TODAY Sports Images

I seem to get less response here on Older Eyes – Bud’s Blog to posts on sports and on science than any other topic.  So, the odds are, I’ll get even less response to this one, which touches on both.   Given that it’s posted on Saturday, which, in my experience and that of several websites that track blog traffic, is the least busy day of the week, I am probably writing to myself.   Which is OK.  I find this topic interesting.  Today … halfway through the first round of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament … there are no perfect brackets left in the Quicken Loans Billion Dollar Challenge.  Or in the ESPN Bracket Challenge.  According to Yahoo, One perfect bracket – “Brad’s Breathtaking Bracket” – remained after the 25th game in Yahoo Sports Tourney Pick ’em, but that bracket was not entered in the billion-dollar challenge.  As an engineer with a heavy background in statistics, I’m certainly not surprised.  Whether the odds of winning are 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 to 1 as most sources report or approximately one in 128 billion as Jeffrey Bergen, a math professor at DePaul University, calculated, it translates to chances of slimski and noneski.   And as reported online, slimski seems to be out of town.  Yes, I’d be willing to make a substantial bet that Brad’s Breathtaking Bracket won’t survive Saturday.