My Favorite Moola Game

I love Gold Rush. You, your opponent, and the "mine" all have 6 stones starting at 1 lb increasing to 6. 1 stone will pop out of the mine and you must determine what the best stone is to use against your opponent with the overall goal to reach 32 lbs before your opponent. If your weight is greater than your opponent than you win the gold in the middle; for instance if a 4 lb gold stone comes out of the mine and you throw a 3 and your opponent throws his 4 lb gold, then he would have a score of 11 to your 0.

Here's an example of some of the luck of this game. I was recently playing an opponet and the first stone to come out of the mine was the 1 lb stone. A lot of times an opponent will play a 1 in this situation, so I play my 2. The second stone comes out and it's a 2, I could play my 1, but I go with the 3 here and so does my opponent. Now, this is a tie, so when the 5 stone comes out there are a total of 13 lbs worth of stones in the center. Sometimes you'll play against a player who will toss out a lower weight here, but my lowest weight is 1 and his is a 2. He would win 13 lbs at the cost of his 2 lb stone. So, I opt to throw my next lowest of a 4 and my opponent throws his 6 stone. Now he/she is leading me 23-4. Looks pretty bad, but my opponent doesn't have a 6 stone and his best stone that he has is a 5. The 4 stone pops out of the mine, so I'm in a bad position here because if my opponent throws his 5 and I throw my 1 it will give him enough points to win. Luckily for me I still have a 5 and a 6. So, I throw my 5, he/she throws his 2 and I win. Now the 3 stone comes out. I know that if the opponent throws his 5 against my 1 that he will win, but throwing his 5 against my 6 is sure defeat. So, he throws his 4 against 1 he wins, but this puts him at 31. I got real lucky that he didn't throw his 5. It's a gamble and I got lucky. He got unlucky. I could tell that the player I was against was skillful and had a gameplan. It fell through, but that's the thing about these type of games there's a lot of luck involved and I barely won 32-31. Either way, we both were skillful, just one of us got lucky.