Booty or No Booty/Strategy

Once you are in the hot seat, strategy in Booty or No-Booty is relatively simple.

To begin with, the switcheroo is completely arbitrary. Unlike the Monty Hall problem, in which options are eliminated with knowledge of their contents, the elimination in Booty or No-Booty is completely random. The only thing that is known at any time is that the selected prize is in the set of remaining prizes. So don't agonize over this decision - it's only the illusion of control.

With all the pagentry removed, all that remains is the value that different people assign a group of items.

Depending on their net worth, this can vary drastically. To a player who is only interested in profiting the most, the arithmatic mean of the values of the remaining prizes represents how much a random selection from the set is worth. For a player who doesn't have any money, a 200k guaranteed payout may be more valuable than a 50/50 shot at 5 PoE or 1,000,000 PoE. As a rule, it is easier to calculate value when the majority of the prizes are monetary. Items such as familiars, which don't have a set price, can cause differen't people's valuations to vary dramatically.

It is recommended that potential participants and bidders assign a PoE value to each possible prize before they play, to ease calculation of their total value after each elimination.