ursulahneumann / simulate-horsey-game

Just-for-fun project simulating our family's horsey game of chance

Simulate Horsey Game

A just-for-fun project that simulates our family's horsey game of chance. A blog article about this project can be found here

Table of Contents

1. Project Motivation
   
2. File Description
   
3. Libraries Required
   
4. Summary of Results
   
5. Licensing and Acknowledgements
   

Project Motivation

Everybody claims to have witnessed horsey 2 (one of the long shots) winning a round at one time or another. I wanted to calculate the odds of each horse winning as well as the distribution of pot sizes.

File Descriptions

README.md - This file, describing the contents of this repo

.gitignore - The gitignore file ignoring mainly photos and images to be used in the blogpost.

simulate_horsey_game.ipynb - Jupyter Notebook file containing simulation and visualizations.

Libraries Required

numpy, pandas, matplotlib

Summary of Results

Horse #7 is the most likely to be scratched and horse 2 (and 12) is the least likely. Interestingly, as you move to each new scratch, the probability of choosing a 7 decreases slightly, and the probability of choosing a 2 increases slightly. This is because each successive scratch must be different than ones previous chosen, so if a 7 is chosen as the first scratch, it cannot be chosen for the other scratches.

Despite the higher chances of a 7 being chosen as a scratch, #7 still remains the most likely horse to reach the end with a 16% chance of winning, while horse #2 has 0.7% chance of winning.

The minimum pot size is $2.1 set by the fact that all the scratch cards in people’s hand get paid before the round begins. The median pot size is $4.80, and with the histogram being slightly right-skewed, with the highest pot size being $13.55.

Licenses and Acknowledgements

Thanks to my family for prompting the idea for this project!