Some more useless information/thoughts:

What it will take to win the 2007 contest.

The 0.266 reported success is just an average of the number of hunters who properly registered bucks in the contest page. This figure has all sorts of problems with it as an "estimator of hunter success", (contest bias, first buck only, etc) but it will dofor the time being. In my first post, I noted thata team ofindividuals each with the average success rate (0.266),would have a hard time winning the contest (1 in ~1650 odds), if"winning" requiredany one team to post 8 "average" bucks. So one immediate thought is that the individuals making up Team 17 are better than average (duh?). So how good do you and your team mates have to be to win next year?

Suppose you and your team mates haveindividualsuccess rates of 0.6 (on average, eachmember takes at least one buck, 6out of 10 years)? Binomial statistics allows one to make estimates of theodds of posting 8 or more bucks,even if we never know the true values of hunter success. This plot shows the odds of posting 8 or more bucks, as a function of true hunter success. A team with 0.6 success has just a ~15% chance of posting 8 or more bucks. (Note that if Team 17's true hunter success is 0.8, that they have ~68% chance to repeat). We know Team XX came close this year, but it looks like Team 17 will be tough to beat by a team drawnrandomly from the pool of contestants. Just food for thought!
It alsopoints out (imo) thatthe contest should just allow one team to advance; this limits the number of "skilled"hunterspulled out of thepopulation ofcontestants that makeup the other teams.(I did a lot of this "crap", before I retired - this is a refresher on the use-it-or-lose-it issue for me, lol). -fsh