The small boardwalk in Avalon, NJ, where I’ve been vacationing with some family for the past week, contains one pizza shop, one ice cream shop, and a small arcade. It also contains the answer to all your money problems.
You may know the game Colorama. It is essentially a simplified game of roulette. A multi-colored wheel spins, you pick a color, and if the ball lands on your color, you win a certain number of tickets, inversely proportional to the amount of your color on the wheel.
The game costs one dollar for five spins, and the payouts are as such:
Now I must admit I didn’t have my protractor with me when I went to the arcade today, nor did I test the probabilities experimentally, but let us assume that Colorama is a fairly designed game of chance, so that the expected gain from each color is the same. That means Red will come up just under one third of the time at 30/91, Blue 15/91, yellow 10/91, and white 6/91 (which is about 6.7%). I don’t have a great idea if this is true, but a brief google search turns up no better assumptions.
This suggests that each spin earns you about 8.24 tickets, or 41.21 tickets per dollar.
Now, most of the items you can redeem you tickets for a priced pretty high. There was a Wii for 45 thousand tickets. Since Wiis cost $200, that is a ticket to dollar ratio of 225. The Pirate gun and sword and eyepatch set that my cousin redeemed 275 tickets for can be found for $3.29 (83ish tickets per dollar). Most other items I took note of where priced somewhere between the two.
Not Tootsie Rolls, though. If you find yourself in the Avalon arcade, you can get yourself a Tootsie Roll for a single ticket. After some further searching, the cheapest Tootsie Rolls I could find online cost $75 for thirty pounds (approximately 1,950 pieces). That amounts to 26 Tootsie Rolls per dollar.
But suppose you play Colorama in Avalon instead of ordering from Amazon. We already computed the yield of 41.21 tickets per dollar, which is just 41.21 Tootsie Rolls per dollar. For 30 pounds of Tootsie Rolls, you are looking at a cost of $47.32, AKA way fucking cheaper.
The final phase of the plan is to set up a website to sell Tootsie Rolls, undercutting Amazon. In summary:
Money->Arcade Credits->Arcade Tickets->Tootsie Rolls->More Money Than You Started With!
It’s called Boomshine. It’s probably more fun that seeing how old Ice Cube is.
My brother and I have been playing our share of backgammon at the beach. I’m up a few points, but it’s been mostly back and forth. Because of all this backgammon playing, I thought it would be a good idea to look up some tips online. I consider myself I competent player, taking some probability into account and sometimes even thinking a move in advance, but these Serious Backgammon Tips are almost completely gibberish to me.
In tip 7, I don’t know what “slotting” is, what a “prime” is, how a prime could be “extended”, nor how one could be have “6 points.” I guess I need to start with the less serious tips.
Last evening, there was a game of Oh Hell, in which I participated. If you’ve never played before, the game involves bidding for a taking tricks. What differentiates Oh Hell from other bidding for tricks games is that the number of cards in your hand changes from round to round (starting with 7, moving to 1, and then back up to 7). The way we played, there is no trump, so whoever plays the high card in the leading suit wins the trick.
The single card round is kind of interesting. Or rather, it is simple enough that I can understand exactly what everyone is supposed to do. The person to the left of the dealer leads, and she is the only one with a decision to make. She needs to decide whether her card is high enough to go around the table. Everyone else should bet zero (their odds of winning are at the highest 12:51).
My brother was in the decision-position for the one card round, my mother dealing. He bid a trick, everyone else bid zero, until my mother was forced to bid one (because those are the rules). Brother had a 9 of hearts. The five people sitting between he and my mother played things that were not a ten or higher of hearts. My mother played the queen of hearts. My brother lost. Now, did my brother make the correct bid? There were only 6 chances to see one of the five cards that can beat him. It seemed pretty unlikely he’d lose. The calculation isn’t very difficult.
After my brother played the 9, there were 51 cards he hadn’t seen, 46 of which he’d be okay seeing. For the person to his left, which happened to be me, there is a 46/51 probability I’ll have a good card (from my brother’s perspective). Assuming that happens, there are now 45 cards out of 50 that he needs the next person to have, and 44 out of 49 and so on. Those odds end up being (I’m almost sure I’m doing this right, but honestly, I never took a good probability course) is just over 52%.
Anyways, I might make a spreadsheet of what to do in my brother’s position, but hopefully I’m not that big a nerd. We’ll see.
Sherri was the ultimate winner.
