I mentioned in yesterday’s blog that we went to a local pub quiz last week.
During the interval, they sold raffle tickets.
I hadn’t realised that the draw of the raffle at the end was to then play a game of ‘Play your cards right’.
I was slightly disappointed when the first number called out was the next number on from the three tickets that I’d bought.
If I’d bought a fourth, it would have been me.
As it was, it was one of our members, Jordan.
So I followed him through to the next room to see how he got on.
That was a frame on the bar with a 3 by 3 grid of cards.
The top left card was turned over and Jordan had to guess whether the next card was higher or lower.
If the contestant makes it to the end of the first row, they win £20.
Which they can keep or choose to gamble for £50 for making its end of the second row.
Or carry on to the total jackpot, which was £104, for making it to the end of the third row.
Jordan’s first card was a five.
So he did what I think most people would have done and guessed higher.
He had a 61% chance of being right.
He was, as you probably guessed, wrong.
A four came up.
‘Play your cards right’ is always one of those games where people win less than you might expect.
A quick Google isn’t giving me any concrete facts about the probabilities involved in the game.
After all, it’s not as straightforward as some games as there’s personal choice involved.
But the closest I can see is someone manually testing it and getting to the fifth card on about a quarter of occasions.
Us humans aren’t as good as estimating probabilities as we’d like to think we are.
Or we overestimate our own ability to work around that.
Some things in life are just pure chance.
But some things have a more reliable correlation than we realise.
Our body fat levels and energy balance being one.
Our weight on the scales has other variables to consider.
The amount of food and drink (or retained water) in our system being one.
But if our body fat levels aren’t reducing, it’s safe to say that we’re not a calorie deficit.
If they are increasing, we are in a calorie surplus.
Body fat is stored energy after all.
Levels of it can’t be changed without that energy coming from or going to somewhere.
All the tightly controlled studies show this again and again.
Body fat loss is a more reliable process than we probably tell ourselves.
Much less randomness in there than we might think.
Doesn’t necessarily make it easy, sure.
But let’s not overcomplicate it.
Much love,
Jon ‘Nice to see you, to see you…..’ Hall
P.S. If you’d like a process and a system that reliably creates results in people month after month for a decade now, then here’s where you’ll find it — > www.myrise.co.uk/apply
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RISE in Macclesfield was established in 2012 and specialise in Group Personal Training weight loss programmes for those that don’t like the gym and find diets boring and restrictive!
