Advantage Yahtzee

Rating:
Summary: Nails two out of the three topics I wanted.
Review: This book includes a decent set of rules, a standard score sheet and a crystal clear explanation of the one rule that most people misinterpret. Neat, but, in and of itself, not worth a book unless you're a purist who wants to know if they are in the "wrong" camp. Imagine my surprise when I found out I was.

Of course, it also includes a reasonably small set of guidelines that will enable you to approximate "perfect" play. Given the "stupefyingly" large number of possibilities, you'll never play "perfect" Yahtzee. If this is what you want, five stars. If you have a penchant for numbers, you may well be playing close as it is. Again, I was.

Personally, I wanted a book with three sections: the two above and the third consisting of the mathematician's/programmer's point-of-view. Of course, the book tells you the approach Vancura used. Without it, the problem explodes. It took Vancura two months to go from "it can't be done" to "did it." But the distance from "here's how" to actual implementation is huge. Would have loved to have access to source code in at least pseudo-code if not C/Perl/some other popular language - preferably somewhere on the web.