Waterloo professor uses statistics to beat Tim Hortons’ Roll Up To Win

Professor Michael Wallace devises method to win 80 per cent of the time By Melodie Roschman Faculty of Mathematics Mathematician Alfré Rényi famously said that "a mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems." Waterloo biostatistics professor Michael Wallace, however, is a machine for turning coffee into prizes. In 2020, when Tim Hortons moved their long-standing "Roll Up The Rim To Win" contest completely online due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Wallace made the news for using his statistics knowledge to win 98 per cent of the time. "I've always been interested in contests and games," he says, so when he found out the annual contest was moving online, he saw it as an analytical challenge. "Games of chance involving physical objects are really robust in their defense against cheating," he explains. When Tim Hortons handed out prizes through physical cups distributed across the country, the chances of winning were fairly consistent: you either received a winning cup, or you didn't. When they moved to an online system, however, things changed.