Stuart Coles

This is a follow-up to the previous blog post which described a series of puzzles based on a description of the recruitment process at Smartodds. Of...

Introduction The recruitment process for positions at Smartodds has changed over the years. In the early days it used to work like this. There'd be...

Here's a weird thing: it's likely that your friends have got, on average, more friends than you. But it's not just you: even your friends' friends...

Sod's Law The buttered toast phenomenon is the observation that when you drop a slice of buttered toast, more often than not it will inconveniently...

Don't make it bad   How good is Jude Bellingham? No, really, how good is he? Suppose you'd watched his games for England at Euro 2024 and had...

Hello Wimbledon and happy birthday to the longest tennis match in history. Played between John Isner and Nicolas Mahut, this Wimbledon first round...

The Post Office Scandal The Post Office scandal has been described as the 'largest miscarriage of justice in British history'. There are many...

Guess Who? Part 1 A young boy grows up loving his local football club. He goes to as many matches as he can, home and away. In later life he builds...

Farewell So, farewell to Daniel Kahneman, who died aged 90 this week. I've mentioned before that in a previous Smartodds offsite, when Matthew...

The dinner conundrum You've been invited to dinner and feel like you should take a bottle of wine. Is it ok just to buy a cheap bottle of wine, or...

Talent and Attractiveness   Do attractive people tend to be less talented? Look at the following graph which shows the relationship between...

In the spirit of Christmas, this post contains a statistical puzzle and a link to other puzzles that, while not explicitly statistical themselves,...