EuroBillTracker

Recently there have been several challenges of a few countries each trying to enter most notes in a given time. We now thought of an EBT-wide challenge and worked out some improvements considdering criticism of former challenges.

On March 24 from 00h finnish time (GMT+2h) up to 24h later (March 25 00h GMT+2h) there will be a EBT-wide challenge going on. The teams are assigned as follows:
Team 1:
the rest of the world
Team 2:
Austria, Finland and Germany

What is a challenge?
A challenge consists - as the name suggests - of at least two parties - one being the 'challenger' and the other one being the 'challenged'. For obvious reasons, let's call them Team 2 and Team 1 respectively. Each team tries to gain more points - in some kind of criterion - than the opponent(s) manage to achieve. After some time limit (in our case the end of the day in Finland) the points are compared and a winner is determined. In the case of EBT those challenges normaly include the criterion 'notes entered'. In contrast to the netherlandic-belgian contests the hits won't be counted. In this competition format we will only compare the number of notes each team has entered after 24 hours (otherwise no-one could beat the finnish hit party resulting in an unfair competition format).
The winner will be the team that manages to enter more notes within these 24 hours being in question.

Why havn't you informed us earlier?
As already mentioned above there have been several challenges at EBT and most of them have become traditional (i.e. the pan-finnish contest in October and the games between the Netherlands and Belgium on Friday 13). Everytime these challenges use to happen a huge number of notes is entered at EBT leading to the thoughts that some of the users might save their notes in advance to enter them in a bulk when the challenge finally takes place. To avoid this point of criticism we decided to keep the challenge secret until some hours before it takes place for no-one might cheat - note that you might still have the opportunity to warn your bank in a way like 'I'll be back - on Thursday'.

Why Austria, Finland and Germany couldn't it have been Australia, Fiji and Guatemala instead?
Ehm - generally yes, however this wouldn't get us any fair competition - would it?
Originally it was planned to have just Finland and Germany challenging the rest of the world, however the note entering rates weren't sufficient for a fair competition. So we needed to add a third country that wouldn't change the balance too much in favor for any team. This could also have been the Netherlands or Belgium - well but finally language related reasons brought us to add Austria - thus none of the forums is split which is another advantage in organisation.

I want to play for the other team!
Ehm yes that's a problem we didn't work out any solution for...

Summary:
Date: March 24 (GMT+2h/finnish time)
Time: 00h - 24h (finnish time/ GMT+2h)
Team setup:
Austria, Finland, Germany vs the rest of the world
Goal: Your team enters more notes at EBT than the opposing team...

doiknow wrote:Why havn't you informed us earlier?
As already mentioned above there have been several challenges at EBT and most of them have become traditional (i.e. the pan-finnish contest in October and the games between the Netherlands and Belgium on Friday 13). Everytime these challenges use to happen a huge number of notes is entered at EBT leading to the thoughts that some of the users might save their notes in advance to enter them in a bulk when the challenge finally takes place. To avoid this point of criticism we decided to keep the challenge secret until some hours before it takes place for no-one might cheat - note that you might still have the opportunity to warn your bank in a way like 'I'll be back - on Thursday'.

That won't work in the Netherlands, banks here require at least 3 days of warning in advance, so that's too late for the Dutch people to order many bills. I will do my best, however.

doiknow wrote:I want to play for the other team!
Ehm yes that's a problem we didn't work out any solution for...

The solution is very simple: go to Germany, Austria or Finland and get yourself some bills! The Volksbank atms in Germany for example make a great source for fivers.

Elmo wrote:That won't work in the Netherlands, banks here require at least 3 days of warning in advance, so that's too late for the Dutch people to order many bills. I will do my best, however.

Not quite true: if you order online before 12 o'clock, larger Rabobank offices have your notes ready for you within 2 working days. I'll be getting mine from the Delft office instead.

XS_Martijn wrote:

Elmo wrote:That won't work in the Netherlands, banks here require at least 3 days of warning in advance, so that's too late for the Dutch people to order many bills. I will do my best, however.

Not quite true: if you order online before 12 o'clock, larger Rabobank offices have your notes ready for you within 2 working days. I'll be getting mine from the Delft office instead.

But that's not possible for me: First I have to change money from one bank to the other: Because I read it now about the challenge (after noon), it's not at my Rabobank-account before 24th March. Ordering the notes that day, they arrive after 2 business-days, so on 28th March.

Ehhhhh, that's too late .

Well, my bank orders notes only twice a month. And no, I didn't take the advantage out of what I knew about the challenge. I think I still have something to track, because I've had only 500 notes this month so far, including the notes from my work. I'm only doing my best (and having a day off work) on Thursday.

Luumi wrote:(and having a day off work)

Gosh!! I'm not going that far!

doiknow wrote:We now thought of an EBT-wide challenge and worked out some improvements considdering criticism of former challenges.

Why havn't you informed us earlier?
As already mentioned above there have been several challenges at EBT and most of them have become traditional (i.e. the pan-finnish contest in October and the games between the Netherlands and Belgium on Friday 13). Everytime these challenges use to happen a huge number of notes is entered at EBT leading to the thoughts that some of the users might save their notes in advance to enter them in a bulk when the challenge finally takes place. To avoid this point of criticism we decided to keep the challenge secret until some hours before it takes place for no-one might cheat - note that you might still have the opportunity to warn your bank in a way like 'I'll be back - on Thursday'.

Who is the "we" you are talking about? Obviously you haven't been planning this by yourself, so how many (well prepared) people are "the others" looking at?

Crazy Bob wrote: Who is the "we" you are talking about? Obviously you haven't been planning this by yourself, so how many (well prepared) people are "the others" looking at?

I'm not quite sure who you mean by saying "well prepared people", but I surely can answer to your question about how many knew of the challenge in advance. The "planning team" was doiknow, Fons and myself. We also sent the announcement to some translators, but we tried to pick them from our non-EBTer contacts. I think the only EBTers of them were Jes and keräilijä37. Everyone else has been informed somewhat simultaneously (when Tuesday 22nd turned to Wed 23rd).

My very own preparedness is limited to a day off from work (as I mentioned earlier), so I should be able to get a thousand notes, maybe even one and a half if everything goes as smoothly as possible. But there is absolutely no chance for me to get notes like in the pan-finnish challenge called "pulipäivä" in 2009 or 2010.

Hello,

people who want to follow the challenge in a graphical way, there is a special page on my site:

http://euro.ernie-hh.de/challenge2011/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

There is also an estimation for the people still needing a reason

greetings
das ernie

ernie_hh wrote:Hello,

people who want to follow the challenge in a graphical way, there is a special page on my site:

http://euro.ernie-hh.de/challenge2011/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

There is also an estimation for the people still needing a reason

greetings
das ernie

Nice graph man!

I guess the Finns and Austrians are not that fanatic about the challenge. For instance: At this moment I have entered 232 notes today (and counting), while Austria has only entered 211. Conclusion: I beat Austria. But I bet that will change later today.

Good luck everyone in this challenge.

Elmo wrote:

doiknow wrote:Why havn't you informed us earlier?
As already mentioned above there have been several challenges at EBT and most of them have become traditional (i.e. the pan-finnish contest in October and the games between the Netherlands and Belgium on Friday 13). Everytime these challenges use to happen a huge number of notes is entered at EBT leading to the thoughts that some of the users might save their notes in advance to enter them in a bulk when the challenge finally takes place. To avoid this point of criticism we decided to keep the challenge secret until some hours before it takes place for no-one might cheat - note that you might still have the opportunity to warn your bank in a way like 'I'll be back - on Thursday'.

That won't work in the Netherlands, banks here require at least 3 days of warning in advance, so that's too late for the Dutch people to order many bills. I will do my best, however.

Luckily, my best bank does not consider it a problem if you order for instance 18:45 on tuesday, when you want to have your notes on wednesday.As long as they have them in stock, it's no problem. Other banks are a bit more difficult indeed. Post offices, however, are better.

doiknow wrote:I want to play for the other team!
Ehm yes that's a problem we didn't work out any solution for...

The solution is very simple: go to Germany, Austria or Finland and get yourself some bills! The Volksbank atms in Germany for example make a great source for fivers.

Luckily, my best bank does not consider it a problem if you order for instance 18:45 on tuesday, when you want to have your notes on wednesday.As long as they have them in stock, it's no problem. Other banks are a bit more difficult indeed. Post offices, however, are better.

That is excactly what I did, 575 from Germany will also be entered by me. So I participate on both sides. Doesn't matter, we will win anyway

I guess about 90% of the ATMs in the Netherlands don't have anymore cash to dispense. Could be hard trying to get any money there I am not really sure what happened in Spain - it must have been something like in the Netherlands...

The challenge is over. These are the results:
Total notes entered: 67.064
Notes entered by Austria, Finland and Germany: 36.126
Notes entered by the rest of the world: 30.938

Difference: 5188 in favor for Austria, Finland and Germany.
According to the rules set before the challenge started this team has won the challenge.

The number of notes having been entered today was enough to be remembered in the Top 10 List. However there are some days ahead of today - all of which have been challenges hold prior to this one. I hope you had your fun in participating in this particular challenge...thanks to everyone who participated, organised the challenge and to those who made various statistics possible...

Some statistics
I calculated the ratio of notes entered during the challenge and an average day in 2011. There are some surprising numbers:
Netherlands: 247,63%
Spain: 209,27%
Germany: 179,24%
Finland: 173,41%
Overall: 159,84%
Austria: 130,96%
Italy: 126,26%
Slovenia: 114,31%
France: 104,93%
Belgium: 100,69%
Portugal: 76,53%

Countries that entered less than 1000 notes. No significant ratio could be calculated:
Ireland: 213,28
Malta: 197,08
Slovakia: 97,20
Estonia: 129,79
Luxembourg: 316,94
Greece: 59,75
Cyprus: 123,84
San Marino: 555,55

Feel free to translate this post to your own forums...

Thanks !!!

and congratulations to all the participants !!

Well we lost, but thanks to the challenge I had this beautiful hit with 1360 days

http://en.eurobilltracker.com/notes/?co ... ale=M_DAYS" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Thanx for the statistics doiknow