And the winner is..

The winner is Naomi from Stars Bridgeport!

So can dancers judge the value of stack of ones just by looking at it? Sort of. Granted this test didn’t result in a very big data sample. I think the only thing I conclusively proved is that ignoring a blog for a couple months will drop your traffic to zero. I only got three guesses on the blog. It’s a bit of an ego hit when giving away money doesn’t really bump site traffic. At least at the club I was able to get quite a few dancers to give me a verbal estimate.

I intentionally tried to make things difficult. There were no objects to reference the height of the stack to (except the bills them selves) and I did not compress the bills. I don’t think most dancers keep there bills like this. They probably have them bundled up and stashed. However, and expert is an expert and they should be able to handle the tough situations with the easy one.

Every initial estimate I got was much higher than the actual value. The average value of the guesses was $202 dollars. The actual value of the stack was $124. The dancers missed the value by an average of $78. The highest guess was $290, the lowest was $161. I don’t think dancers are overly optimistic, I think it was a case of the bills being stacked in an atypical fashion.

Another interesting thing I noticed is that 72% of the dancers said they needed to actually hold the stack to really be accurate. This may be my next test, I’ll bundle a setup of bills to see if how much more accurate the guesses become.

Something interesting I noticed is that when dancers didn’t just guess, but began to evaluate different aspects of the stack they became much more accurate. Typically they started high, but when they began to puzzle it out the estimate would drop. Only two dancers made an attempt to determine the actual height of the stack by comparing it the length of the bill.

The winning guess was very accurate though, within 5%, I’m curious to she how came up with this number. I suspect it wasn’t a quick guess.

So can most dancers just look at a stack of singles and determine the value? Not really. With a little more information they probably can be very accurate. My next test will be a bundle they’ll be able to handle. I’ll also get estimates from non-dancers as well, to see if dancers are more accurate.