Yesterday I was over at my sister’s, and her lad was excited because he had the new South Africa World Cup 2010 Panini sticker book. He had also bought four packets, each with five stickers in them, and I had the important job of unpeeling them so that he could put them in the album.

There are 638 stickers to collect in total and it made me wonder how many stickers you would expect to have to buy so that you had a complete set. I was interested in how many you would need to buy without doing swapsies with anybody and on the premise that there were an equal number of each sticker and that they were randomly distributed.

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