Winner of the BBQ Brethren "Buffalo" Throwdown is...

Finally! A ribeye that DOESN'T get a zero. Congrats Gore!:thumb::thumb:

Congrats, nice buffalo rib eye!

Congrats Gore Beautiful Steak

It's true, Gore always wins. None of us stands a chance. At least not until my new special fork arrives Mr. Gore. My new special fork...

That fork again Gore!

Well done!

Cheers!

Bill

Amazing pics!

Thanks all!

landarc said:

It's true, Gore always wins. None of us stands a chance. At least not until my new special fork arrives Mr. Gore. My new special fork...

Click to expand...

I'm hoping to see your special fork in the next throwdown, Bob! Actually, this comment that "Gore always wins" inspired me to look at some of the statistics of the past throwdowns. Counting this throwdown, I have made 82 throwdown entries (think about that), including 26 throwdowns in a row. This is not including the "Masters" series nor the Newbie throwdown that I wasn't allowed to enter. So, how have I done? If we assume that the voters are blindfolded when they vote, giving each entry an equal probability of getting a vote regardless of how it looked, we can calculate an expectation value for the number of wins as

<W> = Sum_i [1/N_i]

where
<W> = number of wins expected.
i = my i-th entry from 1 to 82
N_i = the number of entries in the throwdown of that entry.

For my 82 entries, I calculate <W> = 9.3; that is, if voting were done blindly, I could expect to have won 9 or 10 times. I would expect Poisson statistics to apply in this case, so the standard deviation would also be about 9, so you can see that I'm very well within one standard deviation of what would be expected in this case (I've actually won just over one time more than could be expected by random chance). In other words, all that experience in cooking and taking pictures of food has given me no advantage and the number of wins is solely the result of having so many entries; i.e., if as Bob says it seems that Gore always wins, it is only because Gore always enters.

It was also very interesting to go back and look at all these past throwdowns. There is a LOT of great food out there. What struck me most is how often entries that didn't win or even do well in the voting I felt could've won and also how my voting would've changed if I did it today instead of during that week. It certainly made me feel that the voting is random. I would be very curious to see what would happen if Chris would take an old throwdown from years ago and had a new poll (probably this would be asking for trouble). For some of these, a winner really stands out, but for many, I could easily see several possible winners, even some that didn't poll well at all originally. I was especially impressed with the Nouveau Throwdown entries, Wow!

^^^^^

Congrats Gore!