![]() Click on each card to choose their values and click the outer border to change each player’s base card. To get a better feel for it, I invite you to play around with the calculator. Both players made strategic missteps that seemed far from obvious to me before beginning this evaluation. The game ends with Ann winning the last question and passingĬontrol of the cards back to Kiko, who can’t complete the row, giving Ann theĪs you can see just from this game, finding the right strategy can be difficult and non-intuitive. However, it’s better to combine that 37% chance now to try and finish the game, and fall back on getting the last question right if we can’t finish. We’re still a 37% underdog to win from this position, compared to a 7.9% chance if we were to fall back to the nine on our third card. Yes, freezing here improves matters if we lose the next question. If we freeze now and win the final question, we’re going to want to pass control of the cards to our opponent, who will only complete her row 23.7% of the time. This may have been a better move earlier in the round, but we are going into sudden death on the next question. Kiko gets another free run, and takes advantage, getting four calls right before facing a Jack as the seventh card in the row. Based on the cards you get as you progress, when should you freeze?Īnn also wins the fourth question but doesn’t get too far into her row before missing. To illustrate this better, let’s assume that you win the first question of the match. As a result, you need to play much more conservatively than in the case where you are the one receiving the free shot after your opponent messes up. But secondly, and even worse, you’ve given your opponent a free chance to play their cards. Firstly, obviously, you’ve failed to make any progress on your board. If you win a survey question, but proceed to miscall a card, you’re hurt in two different ways. And it leads me into one of the bigger general strategic takeaways: play conservatively when you win the survey question, and play aggressively when you lose. I literally had to double check this result, but, by a very slim margin of a couple tenths of a percent, freezing is the right play. He calls lower on the next card, and is correct, revealing a 4.Īnd here’s where the data completely shocks me. Kiko wins the second question, unveils a 10 as his base card, and doesn’t change (sigh). If you feed it the current game state, it will tell you not only your chances of victory, but also the best move to take at that time, whether it’s to play on, freeze, change your base card (if allowed), or pass during sudden death. I’ve taken this giant Markov chain, and built a calculator out of it. I (and by “I”, I mean a computer) then assembled them together into a Markov chain, which means that at any point in the game, if you have these eight pieces of data, you can determine the chances of victory regardless of how the game had proceeded in the past. ![]() Taking every possible combination of these eight variables that could happen in an actual game, I wound up with over 1.5 million different game states. The number of survey questions remaining in the round.Whether or not you won the survey question. ![]()
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