Calculating Overall Odds
If you have a game that increases in difficulty with each turn, you'll have different odds of winning each turn. But how do you mathematically calculate overall odds? For example: Round 1: 100% chance to win the round Round 2: 90% chance to win the round Round 3: 80% chance to win the round Round 4: 70% chance to win the round Round 5: 60% chance to win the round But with every round, if you lose, the whole game is over. Playing 1 round is a sure thing. Playing two rounds it is possible to lose. Play 5 rounds and you are very likely to lose. It works out to be a 60% chance of 70% of 80% of 90%. Is there some sort of algorythm that would give you the cumulative odds of winning a six round game? The result would be less than 60% because you could have lost on one of the previous rounds. Calculating it the way I described it feels like a horribly inefficient brute-force method. There's got to be an elegant formula for this.