Canadian statistics professor games Tim Hortons contest for 80-98% win rates

If I really wanted free coffee and donuts, all I had to do was wake up around 3am every day and click on a virtual Tim Hortons coffee cup.

In fact, it was 3:16 am when a University of Waterloo professor won about 80% of Tim Hortons’ Roll Up To Win games. That wasn’t quite as high as his 98% scored by Michael Wallace, who discovered an anomaly in his coffee chain’s prize distribution scheme in early 2020, but it was still a great lesson for his students.

“I really like the fact that you can take data from the real world and run it mathematically to find patterns that explain what you see,” Wallace told his university’s news service. “This is a kind of magic.”

For those unfamiliar, Tim Hortons is a coffee and donut shop chain with over 4,000 locations in Canada and over 500 locations in the United States, most of them near Canada. The chain was founded and named after a famous hockey player. The brand can inspire dedication, to the point that Snoops offers a page debunking the myth that Tim Hortons put nicotine in his coffee.

A loyalty-inspiring aspect of Tim Hortons is its annual Roll Up to Win contest. Formerly called “Roll up the Rim to Win,” the competition involves unrolling the rim of a rolled paper coffee cup to see if there is a prize claim printed on the underside, then picking it up at the store. I was. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit North America, the chain wisely decided that employees might not want to handle cups that customers put their mouths to and pressed with their fingertips. That’s when the rollup went online and statistics professors started paying attention.

For games based on physical cups, about 1 in 6 cups had a prize under the rim. This is the number of sets offered until supplies run out. As Wallace wrote shortly after the early COVID shift in gaming, the new games were like slot machines, with each prize available to a virtual roller for a specific time frame, sometimes as little as 0.1 seconds. Given that prizes may not be claimed, Tim Hortons clarified in its rules that unclaimed prizes will be carried over to another date until the final day for claiming.

With 96 entries piling up, with coffee sales likely slumping early in the pandemic, Wallace made the best of it at 5 a.m. on the last day of prize redemption, about two weeks after the in-store promotion ended. I thought I would. He played his 96 times, won 67 coffees and 27 donuts, and lost only twice. As he mentioned in his Maclean’s, his maximum winnings were around $500 (which he hoped to donate), but a game with an 11% public win rate that he won 98% of the time. Turning into a windfall was also free course content for statistics professors.

Tim Hortons reached out to Wallace to find out how he won (“They were very nice,” he told Waterloo. , his win rate dropped, but he told Waterloo’s The Record that he was able to increase his win rate to 40% in 2022 using timing and multiple time zones in Canada.

And this year, Tim Hortons, who seemed unable to help himself or retain organizational knowledge, added real-time data to his website and how many prizes he won at a given moment. Wallace signed up a few friends to help him spend hours and days recording prize data. The contest prohibits computer scripting.

Wallace thus decided that 3:16 AM ET was the best time to play, giving him an 80% win rate. The worst was at 11:46 a.m. ET, when, as he told Waterloo, customers in Eastern Canada were having early lunches and people in Western Canada were still on their morning commutes. If you still have rolls to redeem, you can do so until April 9th. Wallace found that the lag time between prize availability and final redemption was typically slow. Lucky on Sunday too.

Asked about Wallace’s continued success, Tim Hortons saluted the record with typical Canadian homage. We know there are a lot of Rollup superfans out there who enjoy building their own, and we appreciate their passion for playing Canada’s favorite game!”

Wallace may be into the game, but coffee is just a token. As he told The Record, he was born in England and primarily drinks tea.

Listing image by Tara Walton/Toronto Star via Getty Images