Your question would be very easy to answer if it concerned a whole basket of "games like this". Now that you narrowed it down to this specific game, it becomes

Your question would be very easy to answer if it concerned a whole basket of "games like this". Now that you narrowed it down to this specific game, it becomes difficult to answer, because we can just throw our hands up in the air and say "it doesn't matter what we do". If we allowed slight variations in the game format, it suddenly _would_ matter what we do, and suddenly we would need to do expected value calculations to do well in these games. Your question is akin to a driver plowing through red lights without an accident and concluding that the traffic light was useless in this specific instance. "I didn't cause a crash even though I ran a red light, so the traffic light was meaningless! In this specific instance I mean! It didn't matter if I stopped to the red light or ran across it, no accident would have happened either way in these very specific circumstances, so why are people even talking about traffic lights?"