Guessing about Guessing: Practical Strategies for Card Guessing with Feedback

TL;DR

This paper investigates strategies for sequential card guessing with feedback, demonstrating that simple heuristics perform nearly as well as complex optimal strategies in practical scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces practical heuristics for card guessing with feedback that are computationally simple and nearly optimal, improving usability for human players.

Findings

Simple heuristics perform close to optimal strategies.

Optimal strategies are too complex for real-time human use.

Heuristics are effective in decks with repeated values.

Abstract

In simple card games, cards are dealt one at a time and the player guesses each card sequentially. We study problems where feedback (e.g. correct/incorrect) is given after each guess. For decks with repeated values (as in blackjack where suits do not matter) the optimal strategy differs from the "greedy strategy" (of guessing a most likely card each round). Further, both optimal and greedy strategies are far too complicated for real time use by human players. Our main results show that simple heuristics perform close to optimal.