Some of my wins resulted purely from general knowledge rather than from having any idea of the specifics of the situation: for instance, in mid-August I answered 40% to "Will Kuwait commence parliamentary elections before 1 October 2012?", reflecting only status quo bias in that a date for the election had not yet been announced. However, early in September I downgraded this to 10%, because I know that as a rule of thumb it takes at least one month to convene an election. The week before, I went to 5% (and even that was quite a generous margin), while several of my teammates made predictions, after I published mine, of 15%, 19%, 33% and even 51% (!).

Yeah. Answering “1%” that “there will be a major earthquake in California during $time_period” a month before the end of $time_period kind-of felt like cheating to me.