Strong shooting without cheating?

What’s the best draw structure to consistently draw legal but high scoring hands? 2x16 or 3x16 shoot well obviously, but they also cheat a lot. What are the alternatives?

You can go for a flush build. Spread your values around and it’s almost always legal, but you won’t win against an entrenched FH build without bullet reduction and anti-cheatin (or spreading them around and hitting their weenies).

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This deck was remarked upon on the day for how little it cheated, both in lowball and in shootouts. It’s a loose 3-value deck with straight flush backup.

A straight focused or flush focused deck wouldn’t cheat so much, and with more hand rank manipulation for straight-up shooters appearing such as Outgunned and the previewed weapon from Bad Medicine, combining such a build with bullet reduction could be more effective in the future.

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Doomtown hurts my brain…

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I imagine someone more statistically inclined than me could analyse a bunch of differently-structured decks and work out the odds of them drawing a cheating hand (@AdmiralGT may have already done this, I recall a post of his from a while back that was full of numbers and made no sense to me).

I wrote a pretty bare-bones program to calculate how well certain structures shoot. It’s pretty dumb when it comes to discarding though, doesn’t really know how/when to aim for a straight/flush. The cheating avoidance leaves something to be desired as well. It does give a good idea when you look at pure/mostly stud bonuses and structures that aim for variations of a pair (full house, four/five of a kind, etc…).

Long story short, if you’re consistently pulling Full Houses or Four of a Kind with a 2-stud you’re probably cheating at least half the time at best.

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Dovian, do you have that published anywhere?

I published a tool on GitHub GitHub - AdmiralGT/DoomtownDraw: Hand Rank calculator for Doomtown Reloaded decks that can calculate hand ranks for a given deck structure. I’m still slowly working on it (draw bullets are a lot more difficult) but you may find it useful.

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I don’t, I make small tools like this in my free time at work so it’s usually some tiny windows form or command line app. I’ll definitely check out your tool to see if I’m on the same track though.

@Doomdog I played with the deck I’m building to make it fit that structure. It’s looks weird :smile:

Any other structures? 12x4?

All those tools are really interesting I’ll have a look once I’m home.

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Oh and another question about probabilities. Let’s say I want to draw a particular card in my opening hand as often as possible. Now obviously I can start travis moone in order to increase the probability. I can also play other cards that do a similar job, to boost the chances I draw either of them. Which gives me w better probability; x4 of a card, and the ability to reshuffle with micah, or just playing 6 copies 2 similar cards.?

This can be worked out fairly straightforwardly through complementary events.

Warning, Maths

In both cases lets assume the following

4 dudes in the starting posse with 2 Jokers (which you don’t want to draw) so 50 cards in the deck of which 4 you want to draw 1 of.
No other abilities to redraw (Den of Thieves makes this a lot more complicated)

The Travis case

You have 4 cards of which you want to draw at least 1. The probability of this is 1 - not drawing any of those cards. When drawing the first card, the probability of not drawing our wanted card is 46/50, the 2nd not being one is 45/49 and so on.

So 46/50 * 45/49 * 44/48 * 43/47 * 42/46 = 0.6469… or 64.69% of not drawing the required card or 35.3% of drawing the required card in the first 5 cards.

With Travis, you’ll only replace in those 64.69% of cases of not drawing the card giving you another 35.3% chance of drawing the required card.

0.353 + (0.353 * 0.6469) = 0.58144… or 58.14%

6 cards with no redraw

Same again except odds of not drawing 1 of 6 cards so 44/50 * 43/49 * 42/48 * 41/47 * 40/46 = 0.5125 or 51.25% of not drawing.

So 49.75% of drawing the required card.

To summarise

So Travis looking for 1 of 4 cards is better than no Travis looking for 1 of 6 cards. The odds will change with more/fewer starting dudes and the number of cards you’re looking for.

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That’s good to know

Another question, this time about straight flushes. I know the flush draw structure I usually played with clubs as the straight value, but is it feasible to do the same out of hearts?

It is unorthodox but increasingly viable I’d say, particularly now that you’ve got “Rich Man’s Guard Dog” for extra anti-cheatin on hearts. I feel the straight-flush hearts probably works best as a gadget deck, but maybe it works as a huckster deck too.

A straight flush on hearts would even help avoid the negative results for pulling clubs on “experimental” gadgets. :smiley:

It might not be “tier 1” competitive (shudder, forgive the terminology), but I think it would be good fun and an enjoyable experiment (appropriately).

One issue might be forcing shootouts/a win condition, as clubs tend to help with that. However, if you’re able to reduce influence via bloodcurses or some other mechanism, and/or shootouts via dudes/goods, then it could have a late game solution. Or just drop so many deeds (secured stockyards, miasmatic purifiers if running gadgets) that you rush to a control point victory.

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The biggest issue that crops up using anything but clubs for a straight flush structure is that your odds of getting a straight flush goes down as the game gets longer, rather than improving.

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