If you’re sceptical about what the odds from the bookmakers or sales figures from bookshops can tell us about who’ll win the Man Booker prize in a few hours – and you should be – then perhaps you might prefer this solid number-crunching from Kiera O’Brien, charts editor at the Bookseller.

Looking at the previous 47 winners of the award, O’Brien has found that (rather unsurprisingly) the average Booker prizewinner is an English, white, privately educated man in his late 40s, who has written a book of less than 400 pages that has a male protagonist.

The prize, she writes, has had 31 male winners, and 16 female. Ten of those have been from BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic) backgrounds – two of them, Marlon James and Paul Beatty, in the last two years. Winners are “overwhelmingly English”, with a 26:19 ratio of private to state-educated. Nine went to Oxford, four went to Cambridge, and four didn’t go to university at all.

The average age for a Booker winner is 48.9, while authors usually win with their seventh book. The average number of pages of the winning title is 378.

“Books set in the past are catnip to Booker judges. In the last 10 years, four winners have been set mainly before 1950,” writes O’Brien, and “not that the Booker prize is dogged by postcolonial guilt or anything, but books set in either India or Ireland have a great chance of sweeping the board.”

There’s another key tip for any writer wishing to optimise their chances. Feeding disturbingly into Nicola Griffith’s research into prize-winning narratives, it is: “Make sure your main character is male,” since no title with a female protagonist has won since Anne Enright’s The Gathering, in 2007.

This year, Ali Smith is ahead in terms of sales, and George Saunders is winning at the bookies. But if past trends hold, can we calculate who is this year’s most likely champion?

Well. Of the three male contenders, two – Paul Auster and Saunders – are American, and Auster’s book runs to a whopping 1,000-plus pages. The third, Mohsin Hamid, was born in Lahore. He is British Pakistani, says the prize information, but this label hides a much more peripatetic life: in a piece in the Guardian, he described how he was “born in Lahore, moved to San Francisco at age three, to Lahore again at nine, to New Jersey at 18, to Lahore a third time at 22, to Boston at 23, New York at 26, London at 30, and Lahore a fourth time at 38. (I’ve had multi-month stints in Manila and Milan as well.)”

If the judges decide not to follow the majority of their predecessors and pick a female winner, then they have the choice of two debut novelists, Fiona Mozley and Emily Fridlund, respectively British and American, or Ali Smith. Autumn, at 272 pages long, is Smith’s eighth novel, and the Scottish novelist is 55.

The only thing we can say for sure is that the result will buck trends: the winner of the 2017 Man Booker prize is not going to be an English, white, privately educated man in his late 40s.

Looking ahead to future awards, I like O’Brien’s suggestion for those authors dreaming up titles for their prizewinning novels-to-be. With 23 past winners’ titles starting with “the”, three books with “road” in their titles, two with “tiger” and two with “sea”, “name your book The Road to the Sea of Tigers and it will be an odds-on favourite,” she promises. Prizewinning or not, I’d read it.

• You can find out who has won at 10pm BST – check here for full coverage.