Play / Experiment / Learn
Trading Suits
A pocket playbook for the card table. Explore what your hand tells you, compare player styles, and plan a round.
Your ten-card hand
Enter how many cards you hold in each suit.
Which suit is gold?
Before a hand is entered, all four model outcomes have equal probability.
Model assumptions & how the calculation works
These 40-card deck compositions preserve the final model in the original playbook. That page contained conflicting suit mappings, and no authoritative game rules were provided. Results are conditional on this table: check it against your game's rules. Each gold suit has an equal prior probability; the ten cards are drawn without replacement.
| Gold suit | ♠ | ♣ | ♥ | ♦ |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spades | 10 | 12 | 10 | 8 |
| Clubs | 12 | 10 | 10 | 8 |
| Hearts | 8 | 10 | 10 | 12 |
| Diamonds | 10 | 8 | 12 | 10 |
For each candidate deck, the likelihood is C(♠ count, your ♠) × C(♣ count, your ♣) × C(♥ count, your ♥) × C(♦ count, your ♦) ÷ C(40, 10). The four likelihoods are normalized to sum to 100%.
Read the table
Use these broad styles as observations, then adjust when a player's behavior changes.
Round budget sandbox
An illustrative fixed-fraction rule from the original playbook, using fictional game credits. This is a heuristic, not a Kelly calculation; no payout odds are included.
Illustrative round allocation
Across the campaign
Early rounds · Observe
Learn how the other players trade, keep notes, and test your interpretation of the deck.
Middle rounds · Reassess
Compare the cards you can see with the model. A larger balance does not make an uncertain read more reliable.
Final rounds · Check the objective
Consider the game's scoring and remaining rounds. An average return and the chance of finishing first are different quantities.