Saw your webpage about getting onto Blockbusters. Congratulations! There's an optimal strategy for winning the most money on Blockbusters, but it's counterintuitive, and many contestants don't seem to understand it, so I thought I'd let you know.

This assumes the rules haven't changed in the decade or so since I last saw the program.

The key insight is that your chances of getting, say, the "R" hex are about the same whenever it's selected, or whichever side selects it. So choosing it as the next square doesn't give you any influence over who wins it - only your knowledge and buzzer speed influences that. All it does is change when it is revealed who's going to win it. So for the hex selection strategy, it's reasonable to act as if the winners for *all* the hexes are determined in advance, and all that your hex selection strategy changes is when each winner is revealed.

Now, with some games, this order of revelation can determine the winner, but not so with Blockbusters. Imagine a game where a colour is chosen for each hex, then each one is covered and players take turns to reveal them: you can immediately see that if you uncover *all* the hexes you can see who's going to win because one and only one side will have a line from one edge to the other, so the game of choosing what order to reveal them in is no game at all.

Thus, have no thought of choosing hexes to further your position in the game, because no move can do that. Instead, do exactly the reverse: choose your moves so as to delay victory for either side for as long as possible, thus maximizing the money won overall by both sides.

Hope this helps,
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