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Is this accurate?

Doesn’t that strategy only work in games like Clue, where everyone is trying to uncover the same hidden character?

In Guess Who, you’re identifying your opponent’s character, not a shared one, so any misdirection only hurts you … because it doesn’t generate extra signal for your opponent, so there’s no strategic benefit to misleading them.

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The problem is when you bisect an odd sized group. You necessarily have to make one half larger than the other. So you're not trying to misdirect, you're trying to avoid creating a signal. But to do this you have to sometimes put your character in the smaller half, which trades off against your other goal of shrinking the pool as fast as possible.

The signal is in observing the number of options your opponent eliminates after a guess.

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