There was a TV nighttime game show version of Monopoly back in the '90’s. The bonus round ran as thus: the player starts on Go, and has five rolls of the dice (with free rolls from doubles, as usual) to get past Go (or directly onto Go for a bigger prize) without hitting a Go to Jail space. Naturally, there are no Chance or Community Chest cards to help or hinder — nothing but the dice.
The additional twist is, of course, that the player has to ADD four Go to Jail spaces onto the board: one on the second block, one on the third, and two on the fourth, in addition to the existing one on the corner.
Are there spaces on the board in those blocks that would’ve been better than others to put the Go to Jail spaces on?
I ran a simulation where every possible way to place the four additional Go To Jail spaces was played 250,000 times, and I got the best placement (in terms of how often you win $25,000, without taking the $25,000 bonus for landing directly on Go into account) as:
Virginia Avenue (space 13)
Kentucky Avenue (space 21)
Luxury Tax (space 38)
Boardwalk (space 39)
You end up winning about 30% of the time
The top results are some combination of:
Virginia (13) or States (14)
Kentucky (21), the Chance between Kentucky and Indiana (22), or Indiana (23)
Park Place (37) or Luxury Tax (38)
Boardwalk (39)
Wow, that’s pretty cool, thanks! Certainly a lot more than I expected when I thought of this!
I also find it interesting that, at least for the fourth block, most contestants got it right, by my memory. I guess they were just remembering the board game and how hard it was to collect that particular monopoly?