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% |