Some Freecell stats

zudensternen

I got curious about how closely the top 10 times cluster in Freecell. In general there seems to be a fairly tight spread, indicating that the winning players of each game pretty much agree about how hard it is!

I kept stats while playing 100 games over the course of two days. I played in most of the waking hours in my time zone, so there's a reasonably representative sampling of the players of this game.

The average #1 time was 42.3 seconds and the average #10 was 75.0 seconds, so the spread in the top 10 was 32.7 seconds on average. The standard deviation in this number was 12.9, which means that (in a normal distribution) around 68% of games will have a top-10 spread between 20 and 45 seconds.

In the games I recorded, the average number of plays was 222.9, with a stdev of 90.5. (I omitted from this stat one Game of the Day that had over 2,100 plays.) I checked each game several times until the rate of increase in its number of plays slowed or stopped.

These are the kind of stats that @jim or @david could probably collect easily with judicious use of SQL queries, but I don't have access to the databases!