A lot has been made of the cautious approach of recent contestants, compared to the crazy gambling that was in favour early this year... so what do the stats say about the average time when people dealt?

I have worked out the average deal time for each month since the show started (no-deal to the end is classed as "7th offer"):

Oct/Nov 2005: 5.19
Dec 2005: 5.16
Jan 2006: 5.15
Feb 2006: 5.13 (A fairly cautious start, given the less than generous early offers we saw in the first few months. Little variation over the first 4 months, which saw nobody play to the end and win a power 5 amount.)
Mar 2006: 5.48 (The Nasty Banker era starts to kick in.)
Apr 2006: 5.48
May 2006: 5.70 (Surprisingly the most Wakeyistic month to date. Continuing poor offers, and a number of bad games contributed to this.)
Jun 2006: 5.32 (Suzanne's game seemed to start off a significant improvement in Banker generosity.)
Jul 2006: 5.63 (Largely down to that trainwreck week at the end of a shortened month)
Aug/Sep 2006: 5.17
Oct 2006: 5.56
Nov 2006: 5.64 (The gambler's era was getting underway now)
Dec 2006: 5.36
Jan 2007: 5.44 (Perhaps lower than you would expect - I suppose the points made by KP and others at the time was regarding the generosity of the offers being declined, rather than the fact everyone was no-dealing to the end.)
Feb 2007: 5.33 (The Laura/Sarah factor wears off dramatically in the second half of the month)
March 2007: 5.42 (Risk-taking returns with Julian, Chantelle etc - then a lot of bad games late on in the month)
April 2007: 5.00 (Lowest yet, three third-offer deals in a week towards the end)
May 2007: 4.96 (And finally we see the average drop below 5 for the first time ever! Although it stood at 5.31 before Lynn's game.)

So the recent era really has been the most cautious ever, at least in terms of when people have dealt. It's too early to assess June as we have had a lack of decent boards so far, but will be interesting to see if the less generous offers of recent weeks start to have an effect!

Wow! They should start putting some more gamblers on the show...

What a MASSIVE signature

Yeah, any chance you could make it a bit smaller George?

heh, I did before I saw your posts! It was the first time I'd posted with the signiture so I wasn't quite aware of the size of it, sorry! (but it IS a great signiture, right?)

hehe you should go on to rate the signature above thread to find out...