About
This site was built by a nerd with an interest in board games and the kind of arguments they start.
Every game here comes with folklore. Boardwalk wins games. Never split tens. The orange properties are the ones to own. Some of it is true, some of it is confidently wrong, and almost none of it comes with a number attached. The questions are all perfectly answerable — they just used to take more effort to answer than anyone could justify spending on a family board game.
That is the part that changed. The modelling tools available now make the work tractable in an evening rather than a semester: a Monte Carlo simulation over millions of poker hands, an exact expected-value engine for blackjack, a Markov chain over the Monopoly board. None of that is novel mathematics. It is all well-trodden ground. It is simply much easier to do carefully than it used to be, and doing it carefully is the whole point.
So the rule for the site is a strict one: nothing is guessed and nothing is estimated in your browser. Every figure is computed ahead of time by a script, checked against published reference values where any exist, and shipped as static data. Where a result contradicts the folklore — and it often does — the result wins.
What’s here
5 games, 23 tools, and no accounts, paywalls, or logins.
- Poker — Texas Hold’em odds, hand-vs-table probability, and positional strategy
- Blackjack — Exact basic strategy, bust odds, and house-edge impact by rule
- Yahtzee & Dice — Exact roll odds and Yahtzee keep-or-reroll strategy
- Catan — Exact resource production odds for your settlements and cities
- Monopoly — Exact landing odds for every square, and which properties actually pay off
The methodology page explains how each dataset is produced and what its models assume, including where they simplify.
A caveat worth stating plainly
This is an educational project about probability, not gambling advice, and knowing the odds is not the same as beating them. The house edge on the casino games here is a fact about the games, and no amount of correct play makes it disappear. Read it as maths, enjoy winning the occasional argument at the table, and leave it there.
Get in touch
Found a bug, spotted a number that looks wrong, or have a game you think belongs here? Email admin@oddsthelaw.com.