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Golf solitaire: Statistics

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
301.2%1.1%
311.5%1.4%
322.0%1.7%
332.5%2.2%
343.1%2.6%
353.8%3.1%
364.4%3.6%
375.1%4.1%
385.8%4.7%
396.4%5.2%
406.9%5.7%
417.2%6.1%
427.4%6.5%
437.3%6.7%
447.0%6.8%
456.5%6.8%
465.7%6.6%
474.7%6.2%
483.7%5.5%
492.6%4.5%
501.6%3.4%
510.8%2.1%
520.3%0.8%
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