Score
0
Best
-
Take it or leave it — and what you leave never comes back.
Ten offers arrive one at a time. Accept one and the round ends immediately; pass and that offer is gone for good. If you pass on all ten, the last one is forced on you.
Every round has a bar: your points are how far above the bar the offer you accepted was, and an offer under the bar costs one of your three lives and takes the shortfall off your score (it never drops below zero). The bar climbs every round until no offer can clear it, so the run always ends. Grabbing the first thing you see scores almost nothing, and holding out for a monster until the offers run out scores just as little — the policy that works starts high and comes down as the offers dwindle. Your score is the total margin you banked.
The number to keep in your head is how many offers are left, not how good the last one looked. With nine still to come, a 78 is a disappointment — the chance that something better shows up is high and rejecting costs you nothing but one draw. With one left, a 78 is a gift. Same number, opposite decision, and nothing about it changed except the count.
That is why a fixed personal minimum never quite works. Set it at 90 and you will pass all ten and take whatever scrap arrives last; set it at 65 and you will take a mediocre offer on the second card while a 95 sits two places behind it. Measured over thousands of runs, the best fixed threshold reaches about ninety-three percent of what a sliding one gets — respectable, but you are leaving value on the table for no reason.
A rule of thumb that holds up: start around the high eighties and shed three or four points for each offer that goes by. Nine left, hold out for 87. Five left, 72 will do. One left, about 60 will do. It is not exact but it is close enough that the difference is noise.
The bar changes the endgame more than the opening. Early on it sits far below anything you would want anyway, so ignore it and simply hunt for value. Later it climbs past your sliding number, and the tempting move is to hold out for the bar itself. Don't. Offers above a high bar are rare, so waiting for one usually ends with a forced scrap far below it, and a miss costs the shortfall in points as well as a life. Keep using your sliding number: measured over thousands of runs, chasing the bar in the late rounds scores about a third less than simply ignoring it.