The author, John Marek, is a writer and executive director of the Anson Economic Development Partnership.
If you’ve spent any time around young children, you’re probably familiar with the phrase, “But that’s not fair!” It turns out they have a point.
When I was 5 or 6 years old, I was invited to a birthday party for a schoolmate named Donald. Donald was not a close friend of mine, but somehow I was invited anyway and showed up for a rousing Saturday afternoon of cake, ice cream and age-appropriate games. While I’m sure we played a couple of different ones, the game I recall is Hi-Ho Cherry-O, and I suspect the reason I recall it is because it is a very colorful, three-dimensional board game and because I won.
For the uninitiated, Hi-Ho Cherry-O is a counting game. Each player starts with a little plastic tree filled with 10 little plastic cherries. Each player spins a spinner and removes or adds cherries from the tree based on where it lands. It is entirely a game of chance, there is no real strategy, but that doesn’t mean each player has an equal chance of winning. In fact, the odds of winning the game are different for the first, second, third or fourth to spin. How much different? Well, I don’t have the math skills to determine that, but a computer programmer named Patrick Joyce does, and here’s what he found.
Using a mathematical technique called the Monte Carlo Method, Joyce programmed the game rules into his laptop and played it one million times. While that sounds like quite a chore, I’m guessing the computer did the heavy lifting and probably completed the task in a matter of hours, if not minutes.
In a four-player game, the maximum number of players allowed, the first player to spin won 27.68 percent of the time. The second player won 25.78 percent, and the third and fourth players won 24.09 percent and 22.44 percent, respectively. That’s a difference of 5 percentage points between the first and last to spin; not a huge difference, but undoubtedly statistically significant.
Joyce also tracked game length – the number of turns by the winning player. The shortest game was three turns, while the longest was a whopping 46 turns; pretty sure a 5-year-old would have given up by then. On average, a game lasted six-and-a-half turns. Shorter games favored the first spinner, who won more than 50 percent of games lasting fewer than six turns.
What does all of this mean? Well, nothing, really, other than things we assume to be fair often aren’t. That party was the last time I remember seeing Donald. I’m sure he didn’t mysteriously disappear right after the partygoers left, but I think his family must have moved away shortly after that. I would attend my share of birthday parties and even hosted one when I was in fourth grade. Oddly, I remember nothing whatsoever about that one. Probably just as well.