Rolling Game
Jane Street
You can roll a 6 sided die as many times as you like. Every time you roll, the amount rolled gets added to you in dollars - unless you roll a 6, in which case you lose all the money you got and the game stops. What should be your playing strategy?
Answer
What does strategy mean? Well we only get to decide whether to keep / stop rolling the dice. So the strategy means we need a rule for when to stop rolling the die. Let's try with an example to see the dynamic. Should we roll the first time at all? Well we have 0 to start with, so we stand $\frac{1}{6}$ chance of rolling a 6 and staying at 0, or with $\frac{5}{6}$ chance we gain some amount. On average, we gain $\frac{5}{6}\cdot \frac{5+4+3+2+1}{5}=\frac{15}{6}$. So our expected change in wealth if we roll is $\frac{1}{6}\cdot 0 + \frac{15}{6}\gt 0$ - so we should roll as we're expected to gain a positive amount of money.
Now there must be a point at which it is no longer worth re-rolling - i.e. we stand to lose more in case we get a 6 than we stand to gain if we get something else. So let's first extrapolate the logic to a general case: when you already earned $X$ amount during the game, re-rolling will change your wealth by $\frac{1}{6}\cdot (-X) + \frac{15}{6}$. You can see that the larger the $X$, the larger the negative term - and at some point once you have enough wealth, the expected change in wealth becomes negative, i.e. the loss weighted by probability $\frac{1}{6}$ is greater than the expected benefit. This happens at $\frac{1}{6}\cdot (-X) + \frac{15}{6}\lt 0$, i.e. when $X\gt 15$. Therefore your strategy is: you keep rolling until your cumulative sum reaches at least 15, and then you stop rolling.