I calculated how many giveaways, you'd need to enter, to win 1 game

FYI, rather than trial and error, you can do 1 / 0.001418 = 705.218617771509167842031029 => 705

Even better: 1 / (13 / 9166) = 705.07692307692307692307692307692 => 705

;)

That's just your statistical average number of entries to win a giveaway (9166/13).
If a giveaway has an average winning probability of 0.001418, the losing probabilty for one giveaway is 1 - 0.001418 = 0.998582

If you want to know how many giveaways to enter on average to be likely to win at least one, you solve x for 1 - 0.998582^x = 0.5, which is 488.474. So after entering 489 giveaways, you are likely to have won at least one. And for 0.99999, that would be 8113.37

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statistics

average winning chance?? you did bad the maths.....

you can't calculate average winning using entered giveaways / won giveaways.
because each entry have a diferent chance of win, isn't the same enter in a giveaway of 1 person than 1000 person.

i can say that the average win ratio of a giveaway it's 50% because i entered in 20 giveaways and won 10 of them (where i was the only participant on these 10 giveaways).

0 brain use in theses maths you did.

do it again for every one giveaway you entered, then you will have 9166 diferent numbers with the chances of win, then grab that 9166 numbers and you can do an average number. and even doing that, these maths will be wrong because the entry in every giveaway will have diferent ranges (like 200 people or 2000 or even 8000 people)

isn't the same enter only in giveaways of 200 people than 4000.

and bla bla bla.....

that max you can do it's calculate average win rate between little ranges of participants. like 0-100 participants 101-200 participants etc....

im sitting at -5.37 won just from july.

View attached image.

Well, each GA you entered is an individual event.

Let say you joined 10 giveaways with only 5 participants each. Your chance of winning each giveaway is 20% (1 in 5). It seems that if you enter 10 of these GAs, you should win 2 of them. However, since each giveaway is an individual event, it stayed at 20% for all the giveaways you entered. The system won’t let you win a giveaway if you have lost the previous four.

So if you are super lucky, you can win all 10 giveaways; or very unlucky and win none.

In conclusion I'd have to enter about 705 Giveaways to win one game

yeah, and knowing that it took you around 1 minute for each entry, and that your time is worth a net amount of $15 per hour, you calculated...
705 / 60 × $15 = $176,25
...you calculated that you paid (in time) the equivalent of $176,25 for that single game won. 👀

whoa ! I hope it was an hexa-A (that's AAAAAA) game, at least ! 😜

Welcome back to Steam Gifts.

That seems fairly legit for public and public group giveaways.

Quite frankly it takes joining these other giveaway types to get better chances:

• In-discussion giveaways (typically posted to General or Events)
• Puzzle giveaways
• Non-public groups

Lemme fix it, u need to enter for 7 years to win 27 games, recently i won game, after like 1.5 year of entering "for fun", cool isnt? Recently i seen guy who already own 3 games with less than week after registration xD

You can use my stats, but most of the wins won are usually ~100 or less with region or group. I do wish public giveaways were promoted more like they gave you some points back when you create a giveaway or group/white worth 50%. Because some people could get level 10 by only giving to their friends and enter all the public giveaways.

it's not "a bit of selection bias" but an enormous one. you don't take into account the % from each GA (as already said), in my case, I stopped entering GA with more than 2k entries (except for a few exceptions), and a handful of guaranteed ones.
With your calculation I get 375.

It depends a lot on how many groups you belong to and how many invite only / level / region restricted giveaways you enter.

My average win rate works out to 1 : 388 GAs. All but two of my wins are from GAs that had some sort of restriction.

1:95 GAs

~56... Quite a lot... I need to stop joining public giveaways...

Experience (and talking to other Support Staff) has taught me that there are certain milestones by which a user can expect to have won his or her first game on SteamGifts.

• The user has conscientiously entered available giveaways for the past three months.
• The user has accumulated at least 3,000 entries with a significant portion being made up of group and invite-only giveaways.
• The user has made a positive impact upon the community (i.e. people are whitelisting him or her, not blacklisting).

While any of the above factors would increase a user's chance of winning, the three of them tend to coincide with each other. Also, while it is possible to achieve all three things without winning a single game (for which I am famous), that almost never happens.

so in your calculation, if someone enters only one giveaway and wins it, he had a Chance of 100%, no matter how many entered?

You could just look at the number of entries at closing for giveaways you entered.

So i entered 80k giveaways and won 1k.. so like every 80th... but i dont get it, because this absolutely doesnt tell anything about luck.. its just that joining more group giveaways and with higher level requirement is giving higher. chances, because of lesser participants. I often stay at 400 points cause i dont find games i would join.

Lies, damned lies, and statistics

You can win something after 100 entries and you can win something after 1300 entries. And statistically it's still ~700 giveaways per win.. I get what you're saying, just wanted to say something about those damn statistics and always messing up our minds :D

Two days ago I won two giveaways.

They had 515 and 1095 entries and it was 0.19% / 0.09% chance of winning each giveaway.
Both giveaways where Region locked giveaways and I won them 18 minutes apart from each other.

Now I did my math, and according to my calculations I would have a higher chance of shitting gold than actually winning these as the way I did.
I looked in my toilet bowl, and guess what? Brown gold.

Hm, for me it is 197 per win so far, but even steamgifts consider me lucky.

I cant say for sure... :)
But when i stooped doing giveaways, the chance of winning got so much worse. And i'm not looking into entered\won btw.
Usually it was close to -5 luck. And currently i'm at -28.
So ii'm not saying that the math is rigged, i'm just saying that the math is rigged :)

Won 511 out of 89,797, basically it's a win per 175 giveaways :p

Giveaways Entered
76,236
Gifts Won
378

So it's one per 201 entered

It doesnt matter how much u enter. U can enter 10 and win 10, u can enter 20k and win nothing

I'm at 204 entries per win. It depends very much on the games you enter.

• If you maximize chance per entry, you can get that number down quite a bit.
• If you maximize chance per point, the entries per win will go up a bit, but so will your total wins.
• If you primarily try for very popular games, your total wins will go down, but your entries per win will go way up.... but when you do win, you'll be getting better games.