I'm sorry to bother you all with this...

...but how does one calculate the fair deal?

Please don't ban me!

It's far from a dumb question, I really don't understand it myself. I had a look at the formula and I can't make sense of it all.

1.) Take the amounts left on the board.
2.) Take the square root of each amount.
3.) Take the average of the square roots.
4.) Square that average.

I'm not sure where it became known as "fair deal".

Boy is that complicated...

Hmm...

I remember the days when we didn't have Fair Deal here....

The Fair Deal has been around since the very early days of the show on the Bother's Bar commentaries. It didn't really get used until the commentaries stopped on there and this site became the #1 DOND commentary site on the internet.

As much I concur with, yes. I recall being a guest here during those early days, and Fair Deal and the in-depth stats analysis I remember coming into common parlance in the first few months of my membership, summer of 2006. I think by that point this site had become the number one commentary site, but I remember there were a lot more comments of a general nature, not much really stats-related or based until....late-ish 2006? Not sure of that though.

I think the advent of the stats after each round affected the comments of a fair amount of members, because we didn't have to have our own spreadsheets in order to know the state of play, it was served to us at every interval in a simplified (ish) format.
And from that, we could look at things statistically (or at least, with some accuracy statistically), where some of us hadn't had that opportunity prior.

It's interesting to reflect on how the terms from times pre-this site's rise eventually filtered through to this site and have since become part of the dialect here.

Although it's relatively simple to work out the generosity of an offer compared to the average of a board, the FD takes more into account the stability or instability of it.

However, apart from 2-box scenarios (where it's fairly irrelevant to any decision making process) , it's very difficult to work out without a spreadsheet so it's more of a guide to the viewer than the player