Gambling by Mail

The results of the elections are in, and I've been re-elected in 5th place with 3184 votes.

But a much more relevant number is 718. This is how many more votes I received than I needed to get into the top 7 -- the CSMs who are assured of attending summits. Or to put it another way, if I'd gotten 719 fewer votes, I'd have come in 8th.

That number, and the structure of the elections, explains why I mass-mailed a lot of people on the first day of the elections. It's important to recognize that positions 8-14 are equally valuable (well, 8th has a chance of getting to go to Iceland if someone can't make it). So if you think you're going to come in 9th or 10th, taking a risk that might shift you a few places is, in effect, a bet you can't lose. If it hurts you, you come in 11th or 12th, which is effectively no loss. If it helps you, you might squeak into the top 7.

Given the situation I was in, with many high-quality candidates fishing in my voting pool, I guessed that I would end up somewhere from 8th to 10th place. I might just squeak in to 7th place, but it was iffy.

So it was time to roll the dice, and see what happened.

The mailing contained a link that redirected through my server to my voting page. After eliminating duplicates and obvious spam attempts (the one from an IP address in India was the most amusing), this link got 2235 hits during the election.

However, I used the same link in my forums signature and in my thread (a thoughtless oversight), so this number does not just represent the results of the mailing.

A more interesting number is 1020 -- the number of hits that came via the EVE In-Game Browser, since these were much more likely to have come from people reading the EVE Mail.

Thus, counting the fact that I lost some votes due to the mailing, and that some of the hits do not represent actual votes, I think a reasonable estimate is that the mailing netted me around 750 votes, +/- 150 or so.

We will never know if I actually needed the extra votes I got from the mailing. But I think I made a smart bet -- in particular when you consider the results for Two step, Kelduum and Hans, all excellent candidates who were definitely competing with me for votes.

Congratulations to all the members of CSM 7, both the n00bs and our returning champions. Tonight we celebrate, tomorrow we fly home, and on Monday it's back to work.