So, let’s take a look at what contestants walked away with at the end of their games against their best offers. I’ve seen so many contestants turn down their highest offer of the game and subsequently just Hindenburg their board, eventually walking away with a fraction of what they could have if they got out at the right time. Howie often calls DoND a “game of luck, timing, and guts.” A player needs all three of those things to really succeed in a game.

That covers our favorite Certified Financial Analyst for now, so let’s turn to the contestants. And with that power I might know better than anyone except the Banker themself how the game works. While these realizations mean I can’t reverse engineer a perfect Fake Banker algorithm to run DoND games for me and usurp the Banker altogether, it means I can still create a semi-perfect Banker Approximator (patent pending) with some machine learning. This deliberate chaos is something that can’t be done by a dumb computer. The Banker has guardrails, which they still sometimes go beyond, but for the most part, the offers fall within certain ranges according to the expected value of the board and the round. The Banker can make offers to lowball the contestant at key moments to add some drama to a game, to make a joke, or just out of pure, delicious spite.

The Banker works within a system, and that system has rules, but those rules bend and sometimes break. While there is a certain amount of discretion in each offer, it’s driven by all sorts of things beyond the state of the board.

Initially, I wondered whether the Banker was just a producer with an Excel sheet, crunching numbers and deterministically spitting out offers, but it’s clear that whether it’s a producer or the actor playing the Banker, someone is pulling the strings and making unique offers (at least during normal play). It’s clear that there is an underlying pattern in the offers, but not an underlying algorithm, at least in the way I imagined it. This is the smoking gun that I’ve been after. Just as people have theorized, the offers track pretty closely with a proportion of the expected value in each round. We can see pretty clearly how the Banker’s offers change over the course of the game.

Deal or nodeal