Hacker News Reader

Comment by awb | Hacker News Reader

Anyone want to roughly calculate the odds of this actually happening?

The specific sequence of rolls has 5 doubles (which can only occur one way) and 4 unequal pairs (which can occur two ways). Each double has a 1/36 chance of happening while the unequal pairs have a 1/18 chance. So that's 1/36^5 * 1/18^4 = 1/6,347,497,291,776 or about 1.5 times ten to the minus thirteen.

It's interesting that the last four digits of the denominator of the probability of the shortest game of Monopoly are 1776. I'm sure that has some kind of cosmic significance.

Nice, thanks

And don’t forget that Player 2 most also pick an “advance to Boardwalk” card out of a shuffled deck.

And the Player 1 has to get “Bank error in your favor, Collect $200" in their first turn, otherwise they will lack $50 to buy 5 houses in turn 2 (which I assume is significant in raising rent for Boardwalk to $1400)

According to the law of cosmic improbabilities, it just has to happen in that Case.

To quote Terry Pratchett:

> Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one. But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.

0 in practice, who decides to buy nothing? And even if player one declines to buy, player two can buy it via the auction.

Sure for Player 1, but if Player 2 reduces their cash by buying properties that still results in a loss. The premise is creating so much rent on Boardwalk that player 2 can’t afford it.

My sister often buys nothing. She has this weird idea that certain colors and utilities aren't worth buying. I beat her every time with my "buy literally everything" strategy.

She might not be wrong. Some properties are landed on more frequently than others, and some give better rents for their purchase price then others. Properties and sets don't all have the same game value.

You obviously have to balance that though, can't just buy nothing.

It's still almost always worth buying one property of each color, to prevent other players from building a group.

Remember that a property is still worth its mortgage price, so all properties should go for no less than that value at auction.

Maybe your sister doesn't like playing and/or wants the game to end quickly.

It's the other way around. I think it's the worst game in the world.

A good change in rules is prohibiting people from buying with the purchasing price - i.e. every property is sold at auction. Best to also do a single round silent auction where the winner pays second place's bid (e.g. I bid 200, you bid 100, so I get it for 100).

With these rules you will quickly establish that some properties are not worth buying. These rules also have the benefit of making games ~30 minutes long because people run out of money extremely fast.

If we say it’s nine rolls of two dice, and the probability of getting any particular pair of numbers in each roll is 1/36 (underestimate since we sometimes only care about the sum), then getting any specified sequence would be like (1/36)^9, around 1e-14. Of course then we’d have to get the gameplay right too

Reply on news.ycombinator.com