Western States 100 - The Dunning-Kruger Lottery

The Dunning-Kruger effect by definition is when people who lack intelligence and/or knowledge aren't aware of what they don't know and can't properly assess their own lack of intelligence and/or knowledge. In other words, they are too stupid to see how stupid they are.

When it comes to the Western States lottery, it's a Dunning-Kruger lottery. That is, our odds of entry are so low that we don't realize how low they really are. Well, prepare to be educated and depressed.

If you don’t already know, the Western States 100 mile Endurance Run (WSER) is so popular that more than 4900 people applied for the less than 369 available slots. It’s actually worse than that because of the reserved slots. Only about 250 slots are available to the non-elite general public. Then they apply a formula every middle school math teacher will love. As wser.org states, "lottery applicants receive additional chances in the drawing for each consecutive failure to gain entry in a prior year at 2^(n-1) where n is the number of consecutive years entering the lottery".

First year entrants are given a single ticket. For each subsequent consecutive year of applying, you double the number of tickets. For me, I’ve qualified 3 years in a row, so I get 4 tickets. That’s out of 15,000 tickets distributed among the 4909 entrants.

And to qualify? That means one has to finish one of a handful of selected ultraraces in the previous year. For those outside of California, that generally means just one or two options in your tri-state area. If you can't make it to that or have a bad day, tough luck, you may have to start over as a first year entrant!

That's not enough to deter wanna-be cougars though as more people enter every year. We go in with the thinking that "Sure, the odds are low, but those are low odds for someone else. I'm confident I'll get picked soon". Dunning-Kruger.

http://www.wser.org/lottery/

I'm only a weekend idiot ultrarunner. During the week, I do exhibit signs of some intelligence and an ability to hold down a day job, one involving data analysis. Balance! With a bit of combinatorics and probability, I put together an approximate forecast for the next four years of WSER lottery based on the last few years of data. You might want to remain seated for this. My analysis is as nimble and clumsy as my feet are on the Dipsea Trail.

The number of first year applicants, as you can see from WSER's own data, continues to grow, 15-20% per year. The good news (for me) is that half of them do not appear to maintain eligibility status. I think a lot of runners get one qualifying race and just consider a single entry as a bucket list item. That, or they aren't as blind to the futility of the WSER lottery and have moved on with their lives.

A two year qualifier is 68% likely to continue to qualify the next year (that's not counting those that actually got in). Someone who's qualified 3 or more years is 78% to 91% likely to qualify the next year. For future 7+ year entrant projections, I assume 91%. After all, if you've qualified for 7 years already, you'll surely win soon, so you'll make an extra effort to maintain qualifying status, barring injury, disillusionment, deportation, decapitation or alien abduction. 9% though - must be a lot of ultrarunners being eaten by mountain lions.

Now for the really bad news. For those of us with a basic understanding of math, we're told we get twice as many tickets each year, so the thinking goes, our luck should double each year, right? Wrong. You know why? Because more people join the fray, and, mostly, all those other multi-year losers are getting twice as many tickets, too. It's just inflation. You'll almost be treading water in a sense. More or less, even though you're doubling the number of tickets every year, your odds of getting in only double every two years. For example, if you've been twice unlucky so far, your odds for 2018 were 3.3%. The next two years, your odds are 4.9% and 7.1%. Still pretty low even though you will have 8 tickets

For first year entrants, it used to be that your odds of getting in were as high as 3% just two years ago (for 2016). Next year, I expect that to be as low as 1.2% and dropping to 0.6% by 2022!

The silver lining in all this is that we can calculate the odds you'll get in at some point in the next 2 to 4 years. The odds will look much better. For you, if you've already entered twice (2017 and 2018), your chances of getting in sometime within the next four years is 34%. Not a guarantee by any means, but not bad. For myself, class of 2016-2018, my odds are better than even, at 57%, that I'll be in within 4 years. So there is room for optimism! Even if it is Dunning-Kruger optimism! Best strategy, like in retirement savings, is to have started a few years ago.

* I should add that the above odds are conditional on my/your ability to maintain qualifying status. If there's only a 91% chance year-on-year, that's a 31% chance of not making it the next 4 years. So you might have better odds of dropping out of the lottery entirely than getting in.

Full worksheet for your fun reading link

As Fiona (Sutton Foster) sings about the day of her rescue from that tower every day for 20 years in Shrek the Musical, I know it's today!

And even if you don't get in, there's plenty to appreciate about  Life after Western States

Get ready for your next race