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A mathematician has claimed to have uncovered a hidden way to beat Deal or No Deal, after running thousands of computer simulations inspired by a viral Reddit thread. The analysis followed a user's claim that he had spent "one bored evening" watching the ITV gameshow with his mum, prompting him to put Python coding to work to test whether the famous red boxes really follow a pattern.

Deal or No Deal, originally hosted by Noel Edmonds on Channel 4, before being revived by ITV with Stephen Mulhern at the helm, sees contestants choose one box at the start of the game and then eliminate the others round by round. At regular intervals, the mysterious "banker" makes cash offers designed to tempt players into walking away rather than risk everything for a bigger prize.

The mathematician explained: "After watching some Deal or No Deal with my mum out of sheer boredom, I decided to use some Python to do some simple analysis of the game theory.

"Now using the much more stingy ITV boxes of 1p to £100k instead of Channel 4 and simulating 10,000 games, we can plot the expectation value (average money value of the boxes), the average money in the lowest box (in ~68% of games) and the average highest money in the boxes for each round (again in ~68% of games).

"If you're wondering why I chose 68% of the games, it's for statistical reasons, but it's too boring to explain. You can think of it as cutting off the extreme values where someone gets lucky or unlucky, like still having lots of really high value boxes left or really low boxes left."

In conclusion, they summarised: "If you go on Deal or No Deal, the banker never offers the average (or expected) value, as otherwise you should always take the banker's first offer. The banker tends to lowball you in the first few rounds (1-3) and, by rounds 4 and 5, starts to make more serious offers.

"If by round 4 your values are super scattered, e.g. a few close to 1p and a few close to £100k, you should probably take the banker's offer; otherwise, play on until round 5 or even 6.

"Now, this is by no means a comprehensive guide on what you should do, and if someone wants to do further analysis, please do."