The game of Golf solitaire is largely a 'fun' game of chance rather than a game of high strategy. The element of strategy there is essentially comes in on those occasions (about 25% of the time) when more than one possible move is available.
Using a very simple experiment, I estimate that you can expect to win a game of Golf solitaire approximately 1% of the time. Specifically, if you play using a simple heuristic of always playing the card from the longest column (when more than one move is available), then this results in 0.8% of games being won. The table below shows the percentage of games which on average will have a given number of cards discarded if you play using this heuristic (to win, you need to discard all 52 cards).
| Total cards discarded | % games with random moves | % games with moves from longest column |
|---|---|---|
| 30 | 1.2% | 1.1% |
| 31 | 1.5% | 1.4% |
| 32 | 2.0% | 1.7% |
| 33 | 2.5% | 2.2% |
| 34 | 3.1% | 2.6% |
| 35 | 3.8% | 3.1% |
| 36 | 4.4% | 3.6% |
| 37 | 5.1% | 4.1% |
| 38 | 5.8% | 4.7% |
| 39 | 6.4% | 5.2% |
| 40 | 6.9% | 5.7% |
| 41 | 7.2% | 6.1% |
| 42 | 7.4% | 6.5% |
| 43 | 7.3% | 6.7% |
| 44 | 7.0% | 6.8% |
| 45 | 6.5% | 6.8% |
| 46 | 5.7% | 6.6% |
| 47 | 4.7% | 6.2% |
| 48 | 3.7% | 5.5% |
| 49 | 2.6% | 4.5% |
| 50 | 1.6% | 3.4% |
| 51 | 0.8% | 2.1% |
| 52 | 0.3% | 0.8% |