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arXiv · 2605.17043

Beyond the briscola advantage: a Monte Carlo dominance test for deterministic strategies in two-player Briscola Game

Piero Giacomelli
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Abstract

Briscola is a traditional Italian trick-taking card game whose simplest form is played by two players. Popular folklore credits victory almost entirely to the player who is dealt more cards of the trump suit (the so-called \emph{briscola}), so that the game would be a near-deterministic function of the deal. We test this folklore against a pre-registered alternative, namely that two deterministic rule-based refinements of the naive greedy policy -- a briscola-hoarding policy $\stratH$ and a public-information counter policy $\stratC$ -- dominate the greedy baseline $\stratG$ irrespective of trump luck. To this end we run a round-robin Monte Carlo tournament of $10^{6}$ simulated games across the nine ordered pairings of $(\stratG,\stratH,\stratC)$, retaining approximately $1.08\times 10^{5}$ non-tied games per pairing, and we analyse the resulting outcomes through Wilson confidence intervals, a Bonferroni-corrected pairwise binomial test, and a logistic regression of the game outcome on the strategy pair and on the signed briscola-count imbalance, so as to quantify the relative contribution of strategy and trump luck. We close with a reproducibility appendix that makes the simulation, the random seed and the analysis script fully deterministic.

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BibTeXRIS

Piero Giacomelli. 2026-05-16. Beyond the briscola advantage: a Monte Carlo dominance test for deterministic strategies in two-player Briscola Game. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6770378

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