Mathematically optimal real-time advice for the Gold Rush game on moola.com.
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Gold Rush is the most popular game available for players to wager their winnings on. It involves a series of six blind bids on gold nuggets with various point values. The player with the most points at the end wins the game, and all of the cash wagered.
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Gold Rush can be described in terms of game theory as a series of six nested matrix games. The solver translates these into linear programming problems and solves them using a simplex algorithm.
The equilibria of these games are usually mixed strategies, which means that the solver will not always choose the same play from the same position.
If the solver plays against an identical strategy, it has the same chance of winning as losing. If it plays against any other strategy, it has greater chance of winning than losing. No other strategy has this property. In practice, Gold Rush has a large enough luck element that the win-loss ratio seems to be no better than 4:3 against competent players.
Although it is optimal in the sense that no other strategy can beat it, it is not always necessarily the best strategy. That is because the solver assumes the opponent is also using the optimal strategy. If you had a reliable method for predicting what sub-optimal strategy a particular opponent will adopt, you could exploit that knowledge for an even higher probability of success. This psychological method is less likely to work against competent players.