Dylan Murray
Monopoly, and most board games like it, are perceived to be games of luck when it comes to winning.
However, also similar to most other board games, both skill and knowledge can lead you to win Monopoly games far more often than the average person. Knowing what choices are the correct ones when it comes to managing properties can easily make or break your chances of winning.
Having a good idea of what properties are statistically the most likely to be landed on would mean that you don’t have to waste your time investing in properties that will never return your investment.
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Luckily for us, studies have been done that have deduced which spaces on the Monopoly board are most likely to be landed on, and the results might surprise you.
Richard Chung wrote a detailed explanation of his personal Monopoly Heatmap experiment on The Startup, and his results concluded that the Railroads were generally the best investment when purely looking at how often a space is landed on.
This is partially because there are three Chance cards that will send you to a Railroad, with two of them not specifying which one and instead operating off of a player's placement on the board.
Other than the Railroads, which do have a cap of $200 when it comes to how much a player will have to pay for rent, the best places to buy properties are considered the warm-colored sets, especially orange and red, as they have the highest probability of being landed on - especially deeper into the game.
As for what are widely considered the best spots on the board, the dark blue spaces are two of the lowest landed-on spots on the entire board. While Boardwalk does benefit from having a Chance card that sends you directly to its spot, that still does not fully offset the unlikeliness that you naturally land there as you make your way around the board.
Now, while there are statistics that can help you win Monopoly more often, it helps to also take a word of advice from someone good at the game itself.
Nicolò Falcone, a Monopoly world champion, told the Guardian that, beyond heatmaps and statistics, certain strategies will help you get better at the legendary board game.
“Buy three houses on each property when you own a complete set,” Falcone advised,
“Also, jail is your enemy at the beginning of the game, but your best friend towards the end.”