Meet the UW stats prof who claims he can’t stop beating Roll Up To Win

A statistics professor at the University of Waterloo discusses how he continues to beat the Roll Up To Win contest at Tim Hortons.

For most people who play Roll Up To Win at Tim Hortons, the winning happens once in a while.

For Michael Wallace, a statistics professor at the University of Waterloo – it’s a different story.

“This year when I played my rolls at the best time, I won at almost 80 per cent of the time” said Wallace.

For Wallace, Roll Up is the convergence of two passions: statistics and contests.

Back in 2020 when Roll Up moved from a cup to online, Wallace saw an opportunity.

“When the contest is on a physical cup, there is not actually a lot you can do. When they moved it to a digital app, that opened up a lot of interesting avenues of thinking about how the contest was designed and how you as a player might be able to take advantage of that,” said Wallace.

Wallace said he read the rules, did a little research on online contests and came up with a theory.