Euchre wisdom: pass on the bower, lose for an hour?
A common saying in Euchre is “pass on the bower, lose for an hour”. It represents the idea that the dealer should always choose to pickup a jack if they have the opportunity to – it would be the highest card in the game. The downside, is if they don’t win the majority of the tricks, they’ll be “euchred” and the other team gets 2 points.
I use an open hand solver – a Perfect Information Monte Carlo sampling (PIMC) bot. Given a deal of Euchre it can see, it generates possible cards for the other players (different worlds) and solves them using Alpha-Beta search. It effectively assumes that all players can see each others cards and play perfectly.
Since it’s not possible to reasonably calculate this for all possible deals for a given hand, we do this for 100 different random worlds and take the average score across all worlds to evaluate a deal state. For more information on why 100 worlds, see appendix 1.
For 1, the dealer’s team is expected to get almost 2 points (1.93) from this game state. They are very likely to win and have a good chance of taking all 5 tricks. The dealer has a very strong hand with the 3 highest cards in the game (JS, JC, AS) and an offsuit ace (AH). Conversely in 2, the dealer is likely to lose the game. They’ll have the highest card, but also no other trump and low offsuit cards.
