A great new contest every fortnight from now until the Federal election

This is a game of skill for all political aficionados.

Nominate the primary vote that the pollster will show for the Liberals, Nationals, Labor, the Greens and all the Others.

Calculate what Newspoll will show the two party preferred vote to be.

Then, for good measure, estimate the satisfaction and dissatisfaction ratings for the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition.

And end up by predicting what figures Newspoll will give in answer to the question who would be the best Prime Minister - John Howard or Kevin Rudd.

This is no simple guessing game. Our competition involves the tipper predicting what figure Newspoll will show and nominating a standard deviation.

The standard deviation allows the tipper to express his or her confidence in their choice of margin. The smaller the standard deviation, the more points you will get if the Newspoll figure is close to your predicted one, but if it is too far out, you will receive a large negative score.

The tipper is rewarded with a constant plus the logarithm of the probability they assigned to the winning margin (denoted x below) For the statistically minded, the formula for the game score (in bits) is:

The table below gives you an idea of how that works in practice.

Notice the very severe penalty if you choose a small standard deviation and turn out to be even slightly wrong.