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. 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, take whatever clears the bar. 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 comfortable threshold, and the question stops being how much you can win and becomes whether you can clear it at all — at that point take the first offer that is over the line, because a life is worth more than any margin you could squeeze from one round.