Greedy Pig

Hopefully you all remember how to play greedy pig, but are you all good at it? Can you be good at it, I mean it is a game of chance after all.

Just in case you have forgotten how to play here’s how it works.

-  Each person records the number shown when a 6 sided dice is rolled adding it to the total from the previous rolls. At any point a player can lock in his/her points before the dice is rolled again. But watch out if you haven’t locked in your points when a 1 is rolled then you’re out, and lose all your points for that round. Five rounds are played and the total of each round added together, the player with the highest total wins.

It’s a nice easy and fun game to play but can be very tricky to win!

In this project you’re going to investigate possible strategies to see which one works the best

Section 1 - Investigation

Question1 – List all of the possible outcomes of rolling a standard 6 sided dice?

Question 2- If I roll a 6 sided dice what is the probability of getting a 3?

Question 3 – If I roll a 6 sided dice what is the probability of getting a 5

Question 4 – If I rolled a 6 sided dice and got a 2, what is the probability of getting a 2 on the next roll?

Things we need to remember

-  Each number on a dice is equally likely to occur

-  What number was rolled previously has NO effect on what will be rolled this time.

-  What number is rolled this time will have NO effect on what will be rolled next.

-  We are never due for a particular number no matter how long it has been since it was last rolled

Question 5 - List at least 3 possible strategies that you could use for Greedy Pig (think of locking in after a certain number of rolls or a certain number of points)

Question 6 – Which of your strategies do you think will work the best? Why?

Question 7 – Play 20 entire games (all 5 rounds for each game) and record the numbers rolled for each round, until a 1 was rolled, the total for that round, and the total for each game. You should work with other students who are completing this project to help collect the data. Write your results in the table below.

Round
1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5
Game / numbers rolled / Total / numbers rolled / total / numbers rolled / total / numbers rolled / total / numbers rolled / total / Game total
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20

Question 8 – Work out the total of each game you would have gotten by using 3 of the strategies from question 5. Write them in the table below.

Game / Strategy 1 / Strategy 2 / Strategy 3
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20

Question 9 – Which of the three strategies was the most effective?

Question 10 – Look closely at your results from question 7, can you identify the strategy that would give you the highest result?

Section 2 – Investigation Part 2

In this section you are going to investigate your own variation on Greedy Pig and find out the best strategy. Some ideas for variations you could investigate are;

-  Having more out numbers

-  Changing the dice to be 10 sided, 12 sided, or 20 sided

-  Using more than one dice

Question 1 – List the important information you need to be able to investigate your variation

Question 2 – How many complete games are you going to need to play?

Question 3 – What are some possible strategies you could use for your variation?

Question 4 – Which strategies do you think will work the best and why?

Question 5 – Create a table to record your games. Play the numbers of games you identified you should play in question 2

Question 6 – Apply each of your strategies from question 3

Question 7- Which strategy worked best?

Question 8 – Was it the best possible strategy? If not what is?