Truthseeker, here is where I stand and how I view the matter:
-People have suggested that 10 attempts gets me up towards 90%, and that 15 attempts gets me even into the mid-nineties.
-I’m rolling with 20+ Favours, and that’s in spite of that I usually use at least one per week after Time the Healer knocks down my Waves.
-I have 15 Comprehensive Bribes, largely the fruit of spending an awful lot of time with the Hollow Eyed Hedonist. I eventually got annoyed with how fast my Persuasive was growing, and geared up for a 100% chance. The absolute avoidance of failures and Scandal does fatten up my effective profit margins in needed Romantic currency; once I have around, say, 3500, that’s usually enough raw value to offset another Bribe. That usually takes around 70 turns, or the better part of a busy day.
-Favours have come easily, though only because of our shared career path; Bribes have come the hardest. I play cards in Veilgarden, though just enough to grow my Amber stakes to match my supply of Bribes.
-I need a little amber to reach 15 full stakes, allowing 10 attempts, (five stakes being needed to sit down), while I’d like to be prepared to lose 15 times. Time the Healer will push my Favours even further beyond my needs this Saturday. I’ve grown bored of mining honey, although 15 Comprehensive Bribes is a fairly worthy grind - that’s a one-turn action with OK profit margin for a PoSI of decent ability.
Broadly speaking, I would recommend 20 stakes because it sounds like the RNG doesn’t like either of us. Who knows? We could realistically win our first hand and be left holding hundreds of Echoes worth of unneeded capital.
If you convert all of your comprehensive bribes upfront, you’re going to be burning through a lot of extra echoes if you get lucky and win early. And there aren’t that many uses for comphrensive bribes in the late game; if you end up with 10-15 spares, you certainly won’t be using them.
So grind up the raw materials, and then convert them at the sidestreets before each new attempt.
(Or you could try to invoke Murphy’s law by converting a bunch at a time. After ~15 losses doing it the ‘right’ way, overstocking on comprehensive bribes worked for me!)
When it comes to things like Bribes which don’t sell for nearly the cost of grinding them – I’m really curious why you’d spend the time to grind more than 5 at a time, considering you might get lucky and end up wasting a lot of actions that you could have spent more profitably on other goals or on making 1.64 echoes per action in Spite. This is really a question about personal preferences and psychology more than anything: is it the horrifying prospect of having only five bribes/cellars/favours, losing five times in a row, and realizing you’ll have to go back to grind out five more of each? Is it that much more satisfying to grind ten beforehand and be more likely to win when you sidle up to the table, rather than having to “leave the game” and grind more in the middle of your sequence of card games with Mr. Apples? Is it about feeling really prepared and secure?
There’s a similar psychology at work, I think, in the fact that a lot of players raise their chances for challenges involving “Running Battle…” and “Investigating…” and so forth up to 100%, which is pretty much always a waste of actions in the long run if you do the math. How much is it worth to you to avoid the agony and frustration of random defeat?
There’s a bunch of research suggesting that people are extremely risk averse; we consistently prioritise avoiding losses over potential gains. (1 bird in the hand is worth 2 in the bush, etc.) It’s why it’s psychologically so difficult to see the Fidgeting Writer all the way through, even though - with enough iterations - that’s pretty reliably going to be the best strategy. (Unless you fool your brain by mass-converting one stage at a time, which makes each stage feel like much less of a gamble.)
When you fail a yacht-gamble and lose materials it cost you a day to grind, it stings. If you do this once per day, each day is going to feel like a defeat. If you play through a bunch at once (and if you’re lucky enough to win one of those times), it feels like a victory rather than a loss.
Stakes required to play: 5 (Favours, thousands of Amber, cellars of wine…)
Stakes ground: 20 (Midnighter payment, Ladybones gathering of the Great Game, that same unrelenting addict in Veilgarden and that same damnably easy card game)
Hands played when I got tired of waiting: 1
Stakes needed: 5