Ever since we have purchased the Monopoly board game, it has become a weekend ritual for us. Almost every Friday/Saturday night Jo would pull out the board, currency, wooden dice, small houses and deed cards and spread them.
We are in for a surprise after playing the game for few weeks. As kids we thought the game is a GAME, ie random to high extent but fun. But as we develop an eye for the detail, the game does come out to be rather unfair. How else can you explain that one of us is paying rents through their noses to the other one owning reds and oranges and how else can you explain that the one who purchased properties next to GO seldom gets a visitor, including themselves. We started questioning, is monopoly fair? And thats where I set out to find it myself.
For starters, The monopoly board has 40 cells, and every player starts at GO. The moves are decided by sum of the faces on a 2 dice throw. If you get a double you get to throw again.
I have tried to simulate the game using excel. I have observed all the rules like community chest / chance cards, Jail and go to jail. But I have not observed doubles rule for I thought it had little impact on the outcome. I wanted to see if the expected probabilities of each cell (which is 1/40 or 2.5%) are close to the actual probabilities.
When I ran the simulation for 10000 dice throws for 4 players, the absolute difference between expected probabilities of each cell, color group are more or less near to the actual probabilities as you can see in the below charts. (click on them for bigger versions)
The maximum deviation is to the tune of 6% for individual cells and 1.93% for a color group (for there will be cancellations in color groups, as one cell gets more visitors the other would get less)
But that is not we experience when we play the game. We end up landing in Jail or a chance an awful lot of times more than we expect to land there. Thats because, no one ever plays a 10000 throw per person game, not in day to day versions. Its more like 200-400 throws. So when I ran the same experiment for 200 turns for 4 players, the results were more interesting as you can see them below.
As you can see the deviation in the actual probability and expected probability is huge. Some times 60% more for individual cells and 20% for color groups. This I guess explains the reason behind the Monopoly game strategies like buy anything in Orange and Red groups etc.
Obviously one fault of this experiment is if you run it again the actual probabilities are going to change in favor of something else. But almost always far from the expected results.
Write to me just in case you want to play around with my monopoly board game simulation excel sheet, I can mail it. The file is rather huge for upload.
Related links: Monopoly Wiki, Monopoly Fun Facts & Strategies, Similar Monopoly Simulations [1, 2]
26 Responses to “FIFA Worldcup Excel Spreadsheets [Roundup]”
Nice roundup! Do you know of any one-page spreadsheets which will be updated by an administrator after each game? Would be nice to be able to print out the latest results whenever I feel like checking them as I probably won't be following closely every day.
I actually haven't tried any of the above ones yet, but I thought I'd mention this one that I found which makes a nice one-page form you can fill in dynamically. http://exceltemplate.net/sports/world-cup-2010-schedule-and-scoresheet/
I would like to recommend you these one: http://www.anotagol.com/
You can choose your interface language (english, spanish, italian, portuguese, german or french) and your country for the timezone of match. I like it very much.
An awesome online world cup calendar in flash.
http://www.marca.com/deporte/futbol/mundial/sudafrica-2010/calendario-english.html
Got one more tracker in excel (one page)
http://cid-b09e57e6e960505c.office.live.com/browse.aspx/.Public
[...] Passend zu gerade laufenden Fußball-WM gibt es auf Chandoo.org alles wissenswerte über Excel-Anwendungen für den Fußball-Fan. [...]
Great!!!
I strongly recommend this :
http://www.en.excel-soccer-2010.de/downloads
Chandoo how you found this ...
@Rohit.. really beautiful file. I missed it during my research. Now, I recommend it. 🙂
Hi Chandoo - thanks for the recommandation 🙂 - Regards
[...] Excel, then print it on the other side of your Match Schedule from step 2 above. There are several other Excel spreadsheet templates you can download, but this is probably the only one-page version you can find; plus, it [...]
Does anybody know how to re-create this(?): http://www.marca.com/deporte/futbol/mundial/sudafrica-2010/calendario-english.html
...or do you know where a template can be found? I am DYING to have something like this on my site. When I found it, I had been looking for the longest time for a circular calendar. I found a couple that weren't adequate. Then I stumbled upon this one and my eyes nearly popped out of my head. If anyone can lead me in the right direction, I would be eternally grateful!
Thanks in advance!
Robert
@Robert...
Doing something like that is a lot of work. You can probably get it done with some hired help from a flash developer.
@Robert, the World Cup flash in the Spanish Marca newspaper is impresive, but not much as my own animated spreadsheet with the Goals of 2010 World Cup South Africa in Excel that I just published into my blog:
http://pedrowave.blogspot.com/2010/06/goals-of-2010-world-cup-south-africa-in.html
Download from here:
http://cid-6b219f16da7128e3.office.live.com/view.aspx/.Public/Goals%20South%20Africa%20Animated.xlsx
And start to enter the goals of the rest of matches.
Has anyone seen, or made, a Spreadsheet where you can record the scorers and see a 'top scorers' chart. Would be a nice enhancement
@Neil... checkout this one http://www.inflexionary.com/sports/world-cup-2010-excel
it uses macros to fetch scores from web (and provides very comprehensive analysis too)
@All.. Thanks for the comments. I have updated the post with few more links now.
Hi,
Check this dashboards too:
http://dashboards.org/world-cup-dashboards-and-visualizations/
😉
[...] Here is a collection of FIFA World Cup Spreadsheets if you are more in to that sort of thing. | [...]
[...] Cup fever is here!In FIFA Worldcup Excel Spreadsheets Roundup, Chandoo has some links to useful World Cup tracking workbooks. Only one of them (the first one) [...]
[...] World Cup fever is here!In FIFA Worldcup Excel Spreadsheets Roundup, Chandoo has some links to useful World Cup tracking workbooks. Only one of them (the first one) [...]
Hey, you missed ours! It has everything you need and more, but not a whole pile of silly extras (National Anthems, etc). I'll be making another one for the 2014 world cup. We had over 4000 hits on it!
@Michael Harwood.
Where is it then? You should have posted a link
Sie sollten an einem Wettbewerb teil zu nehmen für einen der besten Blogs im Web. Ich werde empfehlen Sie diese Seite!
Google translation: You should take part in a contest for one of the best blogs on the web. I will recommend this site!
[...] and welcome to the forum, Maybe these similar spreadsheets might give you a few initial ideas: FIFA Worldcup Excel Spreadsheets [Roundup] | Chandoo.org - Learn Microsoft Excel Online If you have specific areas / formulae / layout choices for parts of your spreadsheet that you are [...]
Calling all football fans around the globe! The biggest football festival will kick off on the 12th June 2014 and everyone is placing their bets of who will have the honour of lifting the golden trophy.
Use our free interactive Excel templatel to predict the World cup finalists ! No macros !
http://www.spreadsheet1.com/world-cup-2014-free-excel-prediction-template.html
I also made a Worldcup-tracker, with MS Access, which can also generate reports in Excel
e.g. a match-schedule with locations on y-axis and dates on x-axis, see:
http://worktimesheet2014.blogspot.com.es/2014/05/excel-with-match-schedule-for-2014-fifa.html
and:
http://worktimesheet2014.blogspot.com.es/2014/05/match-access-app-to-track-world-cup.html
where can i find raw data in excel file format of fifa world cups (1930-2014)
@Vivek
Have a read of: http://chandoo.org/forum/threads/goal-of-world-cup.17637/
The location is mentioned in Somendra's comments
Free XLSX Prediction Spreadsheet for World Cup 2018 Russia!
https://www.spreadsheet1.com/fifa-world-cup-2018-russia-free-prediction-templates-for-excel.html