NBA Amnesty Clause

The current Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) between the NBA and the NBA Players' Union is set to expire this year. There has been talk of a new agreement including an Amnesty Clause like the last CBA did. The last amnesty provision allowed teams to eliminate one contract. The teams still had to pay the entire amount on the contract and the contract still counted against the salary cap. The benefit to the team is that the salary no longer counted towards the luxury tax. The luxury tax in the NBA is a penalty for team salaries that are too high. If the team salary is above the luxury tax line, the team has to pay a $1 tax for each $1 it is above the tax line. Using the Amnesty Clause a team could eliminate a $20m contract from their luxury tax calculations and save $20m. If the NBA brings back the Amnesty Clause, which player contracts are the likeliest targets?

More Memory Game

This post is an attempt to answer the question I posed in a prior post about the Memory Game. If you are not familiar with the Memory Game, you can read that post to get familiar with the rules and terminology. The question:

With the second part of your turn, if you do not have a 100% chance of getting a pair is it better to flip an already known tile or try to flip an unknown tile?

As I explained in my prior post on Memory, there are two ways to score. The first method of scoring is to flip over your first tile and already know the position of its match on the board. The second method of scoring is to flip over your first tile, not know the position of its match, and then randomly guess and find its match. My question asks should you forgo the second method of scoring pairs? 

Memory Game

In the seventh episode of this season (22nd) of Survivor, two contestants played the Memory Game to see who would remain on the show. In the Memory Game you score points by flipping over pairs of the same card. Whoever identifies the most pairs wins. The Survivor version had 20 tiles (10 unique pairs) laid face down. The contestants took turns flipping over two tiles per turn. If you flipped over identical tiles (a pair) you received a point and those two tiles were removed from the game. If the contestant flipped over non-identical tiles, the tiles were returned to their face down position. The players alternated turns regardless of whether they scored a pair or not. First to get five pairs won the game. Watching the game, I had two questions:

1. Is it better to go first or second?
2. With the second part of your turn, if you do not have a 100% chance of getting a pair is it better to flip an already known tile or try to flip an unknown tile?