
Mathematical Strategies for the Most Popular Games - vinchuco
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/05/08/how-to-win-any-popular-game-according-to-data-scientists/
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Strilanc
Misleading title. (The original title is even worse, claiming to give
"mathematically proven winning strategies".)

The article is actually about simple models for various games. What are the
most popular chess moves. Thinking of Diplomacy as a graph. Etc. Not
particularly deep.

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elcapitan
Thanks. Every time I see a WP link on hn these days, I first visit the
comments to see what the actual content behind the clickbait title is, because
the site has become so deliberately misleading.

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cowpig
Those "house percentage" numbers in the last section don't make any sense to
me. House edges per bet aren't nearly that bad[1] (and if they were nobody
would ever have fun at casinos), and if the numbers are based on the average
amount players wagered and lost, then there are a ton of biasing factors that
make the claim "Your best bet is the $100 slot machines, where casinos take
only 3.6 percent of your money." misleading at best. For example, I'm guessing
that the average person pulls the lever on $100 slots far fewer times than on
the $1 slots. In which case the advice should be to play a single hand of
video poker.

Also, the correct advice is to play bet/come-line-craps: it's social, involves
throwing dice, and has a very small house edge (and very high variance, which
is the point of going to a casino!).

[1]
[http://gaming.unlv.edu/casinomath.html](http://gaming.unlv.edu/casinomath.html)

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vanattab
A point of clarification regarding the pass/come-line in line in craps. ,
pass-line bet by it's self is not that great of a bet. With a house edge of
1.41% which while good is not the best in the casino. What makes pass line bet
so good is that when a point is set, if you made a bet on the pass line you
are allowed to make the "odds" bet which is a bet with 0% house edge. (Yes
that's right 0%, but remember to make this bet we have to have already made a
bet with a house edge.) If the table allows you to make a 100x(the pass line
bet on the odds) you can push the overall house edge down to 0.02%. However on
the cheap $10 min table this would require a min bet of ~$1015 every point. So
not for the faint of heart.

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jameshart
"To win a game of Battleship, you need to do two things: maximize your
probability of getting a hit at every turn, and hope your opponent doesn't do
the same."

Not exactly. You need to maximize the amount of information you get about the
distribution of your opponent's ships with each shot, and distribute your own
ships in such a way that it minimizes the amount of information your opponent
is able to gather with theirs. And of course you need to take into account
that your opponent has the same goals (the probability grid for hitting ships
shown in the article of course ignores that your opponent, knowing the center
is a juicier target for you, could choose to place her ships around the
edges.)

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Terr_
It's also a race to _apply_ what you know. Knowing exactly where all your
enemy's ships are is won't help if you don't have enough turns to hit them
before your own ships are removed.

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xcombelle
it is not mathemical strategies but just bare visualisation

