Talk:Pig the dice game/Player: Difference between revisions

: Holding at 20 is obviously not universal: if your opponent has 98 or 99 points, you have more than 50% chance of losing if you hold at any point before 100. If you want a simple rule, this is closer to truth: if your opponent has more than 80ish, roll no matter what; if you have more than 78 points, roll no matter what; otherwise hold if your holding score is more than 20ish. That should be a pretty good rough approximation.

: The fact is, at any give point in the game, the probabilities of roll vs hold never differ all that much: the winning chance of rolling is never lower than 80% that of holding. If you want a ''really'' simple rule, "just keep rolling" is the simplest. But as a game, a good strategy has a lot do with human perception of the outcome rather than boring mathematics. Take for an example, the absurd situation where both players are at 0, but you somehow with a streak of terrific luck and had rolled 99 so far. What to do at this point? If you hold, you have 98.8% chance winning; if you roll, it's 91.2%. You can hardly say the odds are against you if you choose to roll, but you'd be kicking yourself really hard under the table if you rolled a 1. Really, what one may consider a "good enough" strategy sometimes has nothing to do with facts at all. --[[User:Ledrug|Ledrug]] 07:26, 17 September 2012 (UTC)