Thank you to everyone for taking part in the Stand-up Maths Beggar My Neighbour 2025 Championship. I appreciate the hard work and preparation everyone put in and the dedication to keeping it fun and fair on the big day.
A few people have asked for more stats, so below is more of a breakdown of the longest and shortest games etc as well as the details of every single game in a CSV file.
I did actually film a post-championship analysis bit for the video, but it was sadly cut for time. I've uploaded the rough cut of that section as a patreon-only unlisted video if you'd like to see it. https://youtu.be/85GFhqOgk4YThe video was getting a bit too long, so I decided to cut this bit. Let me know if you think any of it should have stayed in! I also cut my discovery that the second player in BMN wins with a 50.23% probability. That slight advantage because player one is a play ahead and slightly more likely to go out first.
This is the plot showing frequency of games for given numbers of cards played. I've cut the plot off at 1,000 card games as it gets super thin after that. You can see an early spike (peaks at 47 cards) which is all of the games which end quickly, before all 52 cards have been played. These are games where the quirks of the card order lead to a quick end to the game. Once 52 cards have gone through, the 'randomness' distribution takes over and it's the exponential decay we'd expect from a half-life situation.
There were eleven games that were over in the record-smallest 36 cards. Of which "foygl vs Sergio Livi" had the smallest number of tricks with only three. Congrats to them!
Martin vs Ondřej Vodáček (36 cards, 6 tricks)foygl vs Sergio Livi (36 cards, 3 tricks)Jesper Petersen vs Anthony Castellaneta (36 cards, 6 tricks)tmuguet vs Jude Anders (36 cards, 6 tricks)Ivan Lai vs Nancy Flores (36 cards, 5 tricks)Jon Payne vs Joe Dispoto (36 cards, 5 tricks)Anthony Castellaneta vs Alan Hanrahan (36 cards, 6 tricks)Les Howard vs Tobias Frinndal (36 cards, 4 tricks)Erin Eldridge vs DaveToast (36 cards, 5 tricks)Wagyx vs Grace Kieser (36 cards, 5 tricks)Zane Miller vs Capel Hanbury-Tenison (36 cards, 6 tricks)
The longest game was "Rémy GRANDIN vs Capel Hanbury-Tenison" requiring 3,198 cards to be played over 459 tricks. If you want to recreate that nail-biting game for yourself, here were the starting decks:
Rémy GRANDIN: 0, 0, 0, 4, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 3, 0, 4, 3, 2, 4, 0, 3, 0, 0, 0Capel Hanbury-Tenison: 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 2, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 4, 0, 3, 0, 1, 2, 2, 0, 0, 0, 0
I'm sure some of you will have other statistical questions regarding the championship. So I've put all the results from all 3,278,080 games into one giant 486.3MB CSV file. Because the censored names are not unique (nor are the full names unique for that matter, looking at you three "Tim"s) I have assigned every player an eight-character hex string to identify them. Here are the columns:
Censored name of Player 1
Censored name of Player 2
Hex string ID for Player 1
Hex string ID for Player 2
Winner of game, 0 = Player 1, 1 = Player 2
Number of tricks
Number of cards
Next 26 columns are the starting hand for Player 1, top to bottom
Next 26 columns are the starting hand for Player 2, top to bottom
And here is the file: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/uao7jqbtep4r9keh1dfdz/BMN2025_allgames.csv?rlkey=7jn8cm96hvuqb8y6pprl35wbv&dl=0
See you all at the next championship!