Hey all. I posted in another thread a couple of changes I thought would make the show more interesting. Namely:

1) A banker who actually tries to get the player to deal for the least possible
2) A slightly modified board to make it a bit more stable

The board reads as follows:

1p
£5
£10
£50
£100
£250
£500
£750
£1000
£2000
£3000

£5000
£7500
£10000
£15000
£20000
£25000
£35000
£50000
£75000
£100000
£250000

So KP, first things first, choose your box

I'm going with Box 21.

So... box 21 is on the table.

Good luck! Choose your first 5

13, 5, 1, 11, 8.

Round 1

13: £5 - good start!
5: £500 - 2 out of the 8 blues gone already
1: £7500 - and one of the new values gone already
11: £50000 - eek
8: £25000 - and another new value gone.

Banker's offer:

£13,492

Deal, or No Deal?

No Deal...

Oh and 18, 20 and 15.

Well, that's one record that hasn't been broken, the first offer deal.

Round 2

18: £250 - another blue
20: £35000 - 2 big blocks on the right of the board
15: £50 - and another blue, that's only 4 left now

On a standard board this would be a 7/7 split, but here we have 10 reds and 4 blues. The banker is going to need to take this into account.

Are we about to see a 2nd offer deal?

Banker's offer:

£19,876

Deal, or No Deal?

£480k-odd on the board in 14 boxes. Average is close to thirty-five grand. That's enough clear of twenty grand to make me feel like I can chance my arm on another round before reassessing at 11-box. NO DEAL.

22, 2, 6.

Not even £20,000 could tempt KP to walk at the 2nd offer. Let's hope it works out...

Round 3

22: £10 - excellent
2: 1p - oh my
6: £100 - you can hear the distant screams of the banker

The perfect round! Only 1 blue (£750) now remaing on the board!

The banker implores you to take this offer.

Banker's offer:

£30,174

The mean is now in the mid-40s.

There's enough of a gap to be a sensible chase, but the gap between the top three and the rest makes a decrease in future generosity viable, and thirty grand is a job well done. DEAL.

I'm just going to take out the rest in descending order now.

And we have a 3rd offer deal!

Proveout time! Will ask for your decisions on each of those if you were still in live play at the time.

You want me to go 19/17/16, 14/12/10, etc?

And for what it's worth, i'd have probably dealt there myself. I'd have been tempted by the 2nd offer but probably turn it down.

£30,000 is probably being taken because it's £30,000 for me. As a % of the mean it's good (69%), but we do have a v stable board here. I'd be tempted to continue but doubt I'd be turning down £30,000.

That's right, and I'll do my decisions when I wake up tomorrow Got carried away with discovering a long-lost friend on Facebook, there...

With the way that this game was going the banker is happy you've taken that offer. He fears it could have got much worse. Let's see what would have happened:

Round 4

19: £750 - Disaster! With 10 boxes remaining they're all red!
17: £75000 - Better!
16: £5000

The board at 8box now reads:

£1000
£2000
£3000

£10000
£15000
£20000
£100000
£250000

The banker would have to give respect to the 250k/100k still being there, but also acknowledges that they're skewing the average a bit.

Banker's offer would've been:

£33,333

Not too bad. We've not got an OPW, but only by £2,000 so far.

Onto the next round...

Round 5

14: £2000 - Not good enough! 2nd lowest value on the board
12: £250000 - That's more like it! The £100k would be perfect here...
10: £15000 - Not to be.

Board at 5box:

£1000
£3000
£10000
£20000
£100000

The first time in the game that the board has decreased in value. This is a difficult offer for the banker to pitch.

Banker's offer would've been:

£19,729

We hope this goes well. This could be uncomfortable...

Round 6

9: £3000 - groans all round
7: £20000 - need to hit that 10000 next...
4: £10000 - ack

Final 2:

£1000
£100000

What a rollercoaster this has been. What was looking like a perfect game still has a strong ending, but not perhaps as strong as we might have thought. The banker points out that KP has either profited by ~£30,000, or lost out on an additional £70,000.

The banker is aware that everyone knows what's coming here. He's aware this is -EV for him, but he wants the last satisfaction of seeing KP turn down a +EV situation and then miss out on the £100,000. He can't see how KP can possibly take this, but is nevertheless offering...

Banker's offer:

Banker's Gamble

It was inevitable.

There is room to take this on, it's a lower percentage of the mean from the offer I accepted as the mean is now £50,500, but on two-box showdowns it's about the utility gaps between the offer and each box. Banker's Gambles are two-box showdowns in active play reached another way.

For me, the sum of money half as useful to me as £100,000 is about £23,000. £1,000 is a better fallback, but not much, maybe adding £1,500-£2,000 to the tipping point compared to a low blue. That means I'd take £25,000 on this finish, so NO DEAL to the gamble.

(Incidentally, I'd have taken the eight-box offer in a nanosecond, may have been tempted to push on at five-box but probably not.)

The banker didn't think you would take that on...

KP's box 21 contains... £100,000

Box number 3 contains the £1,000

A banker victory But KP still has £30,174 to his name

That was a strange game. First one of these I've run. I'd already precomputed (randomly obv) which box contained what and written it down on a piece of paper. So that 3rd round where you managed to pick out 3 of the 4 remaining blues my initial thought was that you had some sort of webcam in here seeing what I'd written lol.

The first round was good, if not unspectacular.

The second round saw a 2nd of the power 5 taken out, but also 2 more blues. Importantly, the 3 top values were still there, which resulted in a good offer.

Round 3 though was just silly. At 14-box, to have an all blue round with just 4 blues left is quite something. This made the board very powerful and resulted in another excellent offer.

At the end of round 4 the mean was up to £50,000, but the board was now sligtly more unstable. Yet the offer still rised ever so slightly.

Round 5 is where we finally caused some real damage with the loss of the £250,000. At 5-box we still hand a strong game, but not massively strong anymore.

And the gamble on that finish was inevitible. I don't think there are very many people who would take that.


Anyone else who reads this thread: what would you have done? Would you be gone at the 3rd offer the same as KP? Or would you be continuing?

KP: You up for doing this again? This time however using the standard board. We'll do the same box distribution and selection so the game is otherwise the same. (The way I did it was to list the board values and tag them with numbers 1 to 22. I then wrote a list of boxes with 1 to 22. I then did a random sequence of [1..22]. So eg the sequence of [3,5,15...] means, board value 3 goes in box 1. board value 5 goes in box 2. board value 15 goes in box 3. etc. Basically put: i can recreate the game exactly, but it'll be a standard board). We can see how the board strength differs, and how this affects the offers