Every deck has an optimal way to be played to maximize the player's win. Of course to play this strategy the player would need to know the order of the deck, and have a ton of computing power and time to figure out the optimal.
But I have been wondering if some insights might be gained by doing such an optimization analysis on some sample decks. I don't know what could be learned by this, but I am sure there is some nugget that hasn't been discovered. I am not suggesting that we might find a way to predict future cards from those already dealt. But there might be something else. Perhaps some of these indices are not linear. Perhaps there is some endplay trick waiting to be discovered.
Has anyone done any such analysis? The only similar tactic in use that I know of is ace prediction. Here the player may hit or stand in unusual situations to bring the ace into his hand.
Optimal play of a deck whose order is known would certainly include very unusual plays in order to time the cards. And I do know from other work that calculating such optimizations takes tons and tons of computing power. So does anyone have access to a super-computer or two? Say on the weekends at the local community college.
