Poor Jim had a rough week on the blog with his forray into politics. Luckily he's re-emerged undamaged with an incredibly insightful entry on link numbers:

It’s not always "He with the most links" who wins the game……often "He with the right links" can win the game as well. Really very often he with the right 10 links can beat the guy with 1000 of the wrong links - I see it all the time.

Jim's also showing us exactly how this phenomenon functions with a nice bit of imagery - check his post for the drawings.

Personally when I see a site ranking at the top of competitive SERPs with a relatively small number of links (>10000) I'm always going to research what those links are and try to ascertain how they provide so much value. Tools like Jim's own Common Backlinks Hubfinder Link Harvester and Tattler can be of great help.