There's a small community of fans trying to figure out the Liar Game puzzles before they're actually resolved, and unlike the generic detective manga where the killer was Joe's twin brother separated at birth disguised as a doorknob, everything in Liar Game is pretty straightforward logically when they want you to figure it out. The current round seems to have everybody stomped and I'm curious if anybody is interested in the such things like I am. The current scenario:
The game played is the 17 card poker, using 4 Aces, Kings, Queens, Jacks, and 1 Joker. Joker is wild. Each player is dealt 5 cards and can swap 0-5 cards once. Betting is done in two rounds (before swap, after swap) in a typical poker fashion (hold/check/reraise) with no limit to amount of chips (obviously the total chips is finite). Nao's team features Akiyama, the smartest character in the story by a large margin, but his opponent has already declared that he will win this no matter what cards are dealt. Nao also said she thinks the other guy has figured out a way to win for sure, and Nao's intuition is basically never wrong in the story on things like this so far.
The only hints we're given is that this guy once swapped 4 of his cards in a round. Akiyama notes that with only 17 cards, you either have a pair or you've a straight (Joker, A, K, Q, J), so you'd never want to swap 4 cards to improve your hand, but does not understand why this was done.
Cheating, such as marking the cards, is ruled out because a new deck is used after each round. The new deck has different patterns compared to the older one so you cannot hide old cards and reuse them later.
Tricks with rearrangement of the deck seems to be impossible because the loser gets to cut the deck and the deck is shuffled by a neutral observer.
Akiyama so far looks to be a far stronger poker player than his opponent in all aspects of the game.
When the guy is asked by his team what if Akiyama figured out the trick (since he is only like the smartest guy in the story), he answered that it doesn't matter if Akiyama figures out the same trick because this strategy 'only works for me.'
Note that not all information in Liar Game is useful. Some are extraneous. I wrote down everything that was mentioned as potentially relevent.
My guess is that this guy will either swap 5 cards if he has no Joker, or 4 if he has the Joker. This gets you at least 14 out of 17 cards in the whole deck used, so he has a near certainty of knowing which cards are left used by Akiyama, so he can figure out if his hand can beat Akiyama or not. However this strategy doesn't follow the criteria 'only usable by one person' as the other person can also do the same thing, and if both players employ this you'd see the whole deck used (swap 4-5, swap whatever's left) and the loser will fold before anything happens, so I'm not sure this is the strategy he will use.
The game played is the 17 card poker, using 4 Aces, Kings, Queens, Jacks, and 1 Joker. Joker is wild. Each player is dealt 5 cards and can swap 0-5 cards once. Betting is done in two rounds (before swap, after swap) in a typical poker fashion (hold/check/reraise) with no limit to amount of chips (obviously the total chips is finite). Nao's team features Akiyama, the smartest character in the story by a large margin, but his opponent has already declared that he will win this no matter what cards are dealt. Nao also said she thinks the other guy has figured out a way to win for sure, and Nao's intuition is basically never wrong in the story on things like this so far.
The only hints we're given is that this guy once swapped 4 of his cards in a round. Akiyama notes that with only 17 cards, you either have a pair or you've a straight (Joker, A, K, Q, J), so you'd never want to swap 4 cards to improve your hand, but does not understand why this was done.
Cheating, such as marking the cards, is ruled out because a new deck is used after each round. The new deck has different patterns compared to the older one so you cannot hide old cards and reuse them later.
Tricks with rearrangement of the deck seems to be impossible because the loser gets to cut the deck and the deck is shuffled by a neutral observer.
Akiyama so far looks to be a far stronger poker player than his opponent in all aspects of the game.
When the guy is asked by his team what if Akiyama figured out the trick (since he is only like the smartest guy in the story), he answered that it doesn't matter if Akiyama figures out the same trick because this strategy 'only works for me.'
Note that not all information in Liar Game is useful. Some are extraneous. I wrote down everything that was mentioned as potentially relevent.
My guess is that this guy will either swap 5 cards if he has no Joker, or 4 if he has the Joker. This gets you at least 14 out of 17 cards in the whole deck used, so he has a near certainty of knowing which cards are left used by Akiyama, so he can figure out if his hand can beat Akiyama or not. However this strategy doesn't follow the criteria 'only usable by one person' as the other person can also do the same thing, and if both players employ this you'd see the whole deck used (swap 4-5, swap whatever's left) and the loser will fold before anything happens, so I'm not sure this is the strategy he will use.
