Math Majors or anyone else who can help

Cyphilissb

Im trying to figure out what the sheet would have looked like for the 1971 Topps Basketball Set.
I know so far that the low pop cards (cards with less than 40% 8's or higher) are numbers
1,42,78,80,89,100,156,162,170,195,221,224,232

Brucemo - I saw that you managed to do this with 86 fleer so i figured you could help me.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, So far i think there might be 29 rows of 8 cards each but then i don't know were card no 233 goes because it would be the only card on the 30th row and it makes the graph look somewhat strange. The only solution i figure is that this larger sheet was then cut into three smaller sheets below rows 10, 20 and 29 which i think would explain most of the low pop cards

brucemo

I have no idea how to do this. I figured out the '86 Fleer sheet locations by printing out a scan of an '86 Fleer sheet and writing card numbers on cards that I recognized. That wasn't rocket science. If you don't have a picture of this sheet, it will be a lot harder, I'd think.

233 is prime, so you are not going to find an X by Y that works for this, unless you think that the sheet was 1 x 233. Maybe something is double-printed, or maybe there was a blank row on the sheet.

If they treated this as a sheet of 240, with 7 empty spots, there are a *lot* of ways they could have done this, since 240 is divisible by approximately everything. Could it also have been two sheets of 120?

bruce

gameusedhoop

Cyphilissb: most of the Topps sheets from that era are not printed in order. All sheets will be the same, but in a random order. The top row may have cards # 23, 58, 102, 16, 57, 69, 71, 90, 82 etc., with the set being 233 cards I would guess that there are some double printed cards. I know of a 71 baseball sheet with many double printed cards (series 1), I think that the sheet was 132 cards, with a couple of rows of DPs, including the Munson, last card in 2 different rows. Good Luck trying to figure this out.

Cyphilissb

Well i tried rows of 7 which means you would have 238 cards meaning 5 blanks, cutting that sheet in half didn't explain anything but cutting it in thirds yielded about the same amount of question as 3 sheets of rows of 8's. To make a long story short Im not a math major and have run out of possible equations, so if anyone can help please chime in.

Guffy

I'm pretty sure gameusedhoops theory is correct. Topps card sheets were not printed in number order and you can count on some double prints.

crazysc

Every 2 1/2 by 3 1/2 set that Topps produced from 57 through the early 90s that I know of has 132 cards on a sheet. So probably some cards were double printed on a sheet, or multiple sheets were printed up with different cards DP'ed on each sheet, so the total # of cards was the same...

jmoran19

31 cards from the first sheet were reprinted on the 2nd "aba" sheet, including Maravich. I have a copy of a partial 2nd sheet. Email me at jmoran19@msn.com if you would like a copy