"There is no simple, harmless pastime that can't be ruined by some guy with a tape measure." Ben Blatt spent three hours in a Barnes & Noble going through all seven primary Where's Waldo books to figure out a system for finding Waldo. There is no mention of whether he got through all the books before he was tossed for hanging out in the children's section. But he worked out a method.
It may not be immediately clear from looking at this map, but my hunch that there’s a better way to hunt was right. There isn’t one corner of the page where Waldo is always hiding; readers would have already noticed if his patterns were so obvious. What we do see, as highlighted in the map below, is that 53 percent of the time Waldo is hiding within one of two 1.5-inch tall bands, one starting three inches from the bottom of the page and another one starting seven inches from the bottom, stretching across the spread.
There's more to the story, of course, and even a challenge to see if his method holds up. Read the entire account at Slate.
Metafilter has a few Where's Waldo pages linked so you can try this method out for yourself.