Playing to Win

[CSamurai]

http://www.sirlin.net/ptw-book/intermediates-guide.html

This was recently posted, in a discussion about Starcraft.

I've read most of the first few pages of this book, and I have to say, I have mixed feelings about his philosophy.

On the one hand, I agree about his views on banning. Banning characters, 'cheap' moves, etc, is just weakness talking. If someone beats you by throwing you over and over, you're doing something wrong, being defeated by a 'cheap' tactic should inspire you to strengthen your game vs that tactic.

When I was heavily into Mortal Kombat 2 (and other fighting arcaders of the time) there were 'sweep cheaps' that if you let, for instance, Scorpion sweep you, you could bet that the next 3 moves would be sweeps. You could lose about a quater of your life from sweeps. Sub Zero's slide was similar, if you could execute it again and again you could juggle someone. But, if you knew your opponent had these skills, there were counters.

But, on the other hand, even when I was heavily into fighters, and other competative games, I tried to avoid 'the cheap play'. Not because I felt it was dishonorable, but because it was honestly more fun to pit my skills against his without resorting to cheap 'one trick' matches. The key here though, is that I learned the cheap moves, and how to get around them. In that, I agree, crying cheap won't alter the game, and if you lose to a flawed tactic, you need to learn the counter. But saying the only way to play to win is to resort to any means, any time, I think weakens you as well. You never have to learn the hard way around the cheapness.

When I played Counter Strike (showing my age, I know) I used to play on servers that I knew hackers were on. I reasoned that if I could beat the hackers without any hacks, I would be able to rule on tournament legal servers. This training regime got me banned from playing with more than a pistol in casual games with my clan.

If there was an exploit in a map, I'd learn it, so that I could learn to watch for people using it. I'd learn to avoid that route, or find the way around. These things were 'normal' to me, and while I might cry cheap about someone camping on an inaccessible spot that was only reachable through head jumping exploits (you can jump on a teamate while they're squatted, and then they stand up, letting you reach tops of boxes that were not intended to be climbed) the next thing I'd do is find a way to kill them in that spot.

But I never resorted to head jumping exploits, or map exploits. If that was what it took for others to win, I'd play better. I'd be better. And I'd still have my code of honor.

He sneers at this thought, as if the honor of a gamer is useless. In the philosophy espoused, the only thing that matters is winning, and everything else is secondary. I disagree. The most important thing is 'Playing the best you know how'. If all you are is a collection of one trick tactics, what happens when someone knows the counter to those moves? Do you really improve, or just sit there, and stagnate, because of your reliance on cheapness, which, while it won't win you every game, wins you enough?

I don't care if I win every game. If winning every game requires me to use techniques which I feel are not 'fundamentally sound', then I'd rather lose.

It's got me to thinking about Go, in context to 'Bad Moves'.

I used to grow very frustrated that people would beat me using 'bad moves', because I didn't know the proper punishment for them.

As time went on, I grew to recognize, some of these bad moves as 'trick plays', common tactics used to trick an opponent into a mistake early on.

So I've studied a lot, to try to get a better feel for counters, joseki, and while I haven't studied trick plays in particular, at my level, I see fewer tricks that I can't read to the end of.

But I still think it's fundamentally bad to use a move that you know wouldn't succede against a player of a higher rank, just to see if your opponent will screw up. That is, if I can read to the end of a sequence, and every reasonable variation ends in the death/failure of my stones, I'd rather not play it, even if it could lead to some huge screaming error on the part of my opponent. I feel like playing the 'lets see you read this' moves, the moves you know fail, and have no positive tradeoff for you if they do, leads to a reliance on them which will fail when confronted with skilled players who understand your tricks and overplays.

So, even when playing weaker players, I tend to try to avoid 'bad' or 'cheap' moves, not because I feel like they could properly punish them, but because I feel like I should be able to play well enough without those moves to win anyway.

Does this mean that I'm not playing to win? Does this hold me back?

I'm not so sure I want to win if it takes abandoning honor and good play.

C Samurai

[Chew Terr]

When playing go, I rarely feel personally invested in beating any single opponent. While I can get frustrated when I lose, it's usually more because I hate knowing I played poorly. As a result, I feel much more like my only real opponent is myself. If I know a good refutation to a sequence, I try to not play it. Otherwise, it's just one more bad habit. When I realized this and made this goal, I immediately lost 15 games, and then gained 3 stoned (to become SDK).

I like the way you think, though we'd quibble over specifics.

[Bill Spight]

Bridge Champion Marshall Miles once wrote about his attitude to local club games, where the competition was quite weak. He played every hand as though he were at a National Championship, playing against his peers.

[Monadology]

If someone beats you by throwing you over and over, you're doing something wrong, being defeated by a 'cheap' tactic should inspire you to strengthen your game vs that tactic.

No. Sometimes the only thing you're doing wrong is not employing the tactic yourself.

It's always a good idea to try and think your way around it. It's more probable than not that you aren't considering an effective counter-strategy. But sometimes the counter-strategy is obscure, difficult or simply non-existent. There is nothing wrong with, after repeated frustration, refusing the play the game without introducing some artificial restrictions to make it at least interesting again. Furthermore, a game with design that leads to an unimaginitive, repetitive and easily abusable technique to dominate except for a few counter strategies used primarily to stop said technique is not very well designed.

With something like Go, there is at least a very clearly defined route for determining a counter strategy. In video games, this is not necessarily the case.

tl;dr: Sometimes the scrub is right. Sometimes, a game is designed (intentionally or not) such that the most effective strategy is uninteresting. And I don't just mean they lack entertainment value. I mean that once discovered and implemented, the scope of the competition becomes narrow enough that a win no longer means anything except in an incredibly parochial sense (e.g. who could get the infinite throw loop going first).

[Jedo]

If someone beats you by throwing you over and over, you're doing something wrong, being defeated by a 'cheap' tactic should inspire you to strengthen your game vs that tactic.

No. Sometimes the only thing you're doing wrong is not employing the tactic yourself.

It's always a good idea to try and think your way around it. It's more probable than not that you aren't considering an effective counter-strategy. But sometimes the counter-strategy is obscure, difficult or simply non-existent. There is nothing wrong with, after repeated frustration, refusing the play the game without introducing some artificial restrictions to make it at least interesting again. Furthermore, a game with design that leads to an unimaginitive, repetitive and easily abusable technique to dominate except for a few counter strategies used primarily to stop said technique is not very well designed.

With something like Go, there is at least a very clearly defined route for determining a counter strategy. In video games, this is not necessarily the case.

tl;dr: Sometimes the scrub is right. Sometimes, a game is designed (intentionally or not) such that the most effective strategy is uninteresting. And I don't just mean they lack entertainment value. I mean that once discovered and implemented, the scope of the competition becomes narrow enough that a win no longer means anything except in an incredibly parochial sense (e.g. who could get the infinite throw loop going first).

Yeah I agree with this. The problem with the article is that it assumes that all these games are perfectly balanced, and there is no move that is unfair. However this is most certainly not the case, and in many games (brawl I'm lookin at you) banning moves or sometimes even characters is the only way to keep those things from completely breaking the game.

[CSamurai]

If someone beats you by throwing you over and over, you're doing something wrong, being defeated by a 'cheap' tactic should inspire you to strengthen your game vs that tactic.

No. Sometimes the only thing you're doing wrong is not employing the tactic yourself.

It's always a good idea to try and think your way around it. It's more probable than not that you aren't considering an effective counter-strategy. But sometimes the counter-strategy is obscure, difficult or simply non-existent. There is nothing wrong with, after repeated frustration, refusing the play the game without introducing some artificial restrictions to make it at least interesting again. Furthermore, a game with design that leads to an unimaginitive, repetitive and easily abusable technique to dominate except for a few counter strategies used primarily to stop said technique is not very well designed.

With something like Go, there is at least a very clearly defined route for determining a counter strategy. In video games, this is not necessarily the case.

tl;dr: Sometimes the scrub is right. Sometimes, a game is designed (intentionally or not) such that the most effective strategy is uninteresting. And I don't just mean they lack entertainment value. I mean that once discovered and implemented, the scope of the competition becomes narrow enough that a win no longer means anything except in an incredibly parochial sense (e.g. who could get the infinite throw loop going first).

Yeah I agree with this. The problem with the article is that it assumes that all these games are perfectly balanced, and there is no move that is unfair. However this is most certainly not the case, and in many games (brawl I'm lookin at you) banning moves or sometimes even characters is the only way to keep those things from completely breaking the game.

Well, to be fair to the author, he does adress actual game breaking imbalance later, calling for bans, and even patches to adress such 'broken' things as Akuma in Street Fighter 2 Turbo. But he is, in general, right. Just because a move or sequence seems 'unbeatable' doesn't mean it is, just because countering it is hard doesn't mean learning the counter is not worthwhile.

When I played fighting games, I would get friends to play 'cheap' characters and 'cheap' combos so that I could experiment with counters.

Sometimes, the only way to beat the cheapness is to do it yourself, but that is amazingly, excedingly rare. I've often found it easier to play cheap than to learn to play well, but.. The cheapness is easy. The cheapness is 'the Dark Side'. It leads to easy win. Sure, it requires some sort of skills to execute a infinite combo (I mean, the timing alone is incredibly tricky on most of the glitches I've ever encountered) but they're easy compared to 'skill' at playing the game.

My points, however, are:
A) If a game can't be won without being cheap, it's not a game I'm interested in winning.
B) If playing to win requires me to play 'cheap' moves simply because I think my opponent can't deal with the tactic, I don't want to play to win.

If that makes me a scrub, I'm a scrub.

C Samurai (Scrub)

[Sverre]

tl;dr: Sometimes the scrub is right. Sometimes, a game is designed (intentionally or not) such that the most effective strategy is uninteresting. And I don't just mean they lack entertainment value. I mean that once discovered and implemented, the scope of the competition becomes narrow enough that a win no longer means anything except in an incredibly parochial sense (e.g. who could get the infinite throw loop going first).

If the optimal strategy makes the game not worth playing, then the game is not worth playing. The correct solution is to change the rules of the game or to find a better game to play.

Playing "cheap" moves and overplays in Go is worth it because it forces you and your opponent to learn how to counter that type of moves. If any stronger player would easily defeat the move, then become stronger and defeat the move instead of complaining about it! In even games I will make any move I believe can let me win.

[Toge]

My points, however, are:
A) If a game can't be won without being cheap, it's not a game I'm interested in winning.
B) If playing to win requires me to play 'cheap' moves simply because I think my opponent can't deal with the tactic, I don't want to play to win.

- What makes a tactic cheap? Take Counter-Strike for example. Some people are saying that using AWP is cheap and some servers have even banned the weapon altogether. What makes AWP so good is the conditional power it gives on long-range battles. Then again AWP user needs support against flanking and smoke grenade on close proximity makes sniping tactic very difficult. Much of AWP's "cheapness" is just impression. It makes a big bang noise and you're dead with one shot. I sometimes go to deathmatch servers where everyone and their brother is standing in row, watching same small spot with AWPs. I take TMP "worst gun in game" and go flank them one by one. You walk faster while carrying TMP and the gun doesn't make any noise. It also kills at point blank range just as well as a rifle.

When this happens, most players attribute the failure to their own silliness. There was nothing overpowered about the gun they got killed with. Isn't this whole mindset just ridiculous? "AWP on long" is a name of one challenge. "Unwatched flank" is a name of another challenge. What is a matter of life and death is what kind of solutions teams have to these challenges. When you're a bad player and don't have solution, then mouth utters "cheap". This is poison, because wrong attribution makes finding solution more difficult.

Edit:
Oh yeah, Starcraft example!
Two newbies are playing Terran versus Zerg.
Terran makes 30 siege tanks. Zerg makes 30 hydralisks.
Siege tanks are put on top of cliff in siege mode.
Hydralisks are ball'd up and begin rushing towards the cliff.
Siege tanks crush hydralisks mercilessly.
"Terran is overpowered!!!"

[gaius]

IMO, the only only kind of tactic that you could, if you really wanted to, realistically call "cheap" are hamete ones. That is, tactics that can be refuted and will backfire if someone is comfortable with the refutation. Even so, I agree with all the previous points about learning to beat them.

I have never been a serious gamer, but I did play Age of Mythology for a while. In that game I almost always used the Norse (mostly Thor) to set up an immediate base/econ rush. That's an aggressive, but certainly very viable tactic. In fact, the whole faction of the Norse is perfect for early raiding, and definitely also designed for that. Sure, if either I or my opponent messed up, the strategy could lead to to quick loss or victory, but more often than not, it developed into intense, long games where both players have the challenge to develop some tech even in the middle of econ raids and skirmishes everywhere. I like that kind of game, and if somebody couldn't stand being disrupted so early (which quite a few couldn't), that's their problem, not mine .

[gowan]

http://www.sirlin.net/ptw-book/intermediates-guide.html

But I still think it's fundamentally bad to use a move that you know wouldn't succede against a player of a higher rank, just to see if your opponent will screw up. That is, if I can read to the end of a sequence, and every reasonable variation ends in the death/failure of my stones, I'd rather not play it, even if it could lead to some huge screaming error on the part of my opponent. I feel like playing the 'lets see you read this' moves, the moves you know fail, and have no positive tradeoff for you if they do, leads to a reliance on them which will fail when confronted with skilled players who understand your tricks and overplays.

I used to play at a club where there was a player somewhere around 2d in strength who played handicap games with weaker players all the time. He was really "good" at it and usually made people take a significantly bigger handicap than ranks would indicate. I put the word good in quaotes because he mostly used tricky moves that only worked against players weaker than he was. He wasn't so good at even games because he couldn't resist playing the tricks and overplays that worked against weaker players. He couldn't understand why he had so much trouble against players of the same rank or higher.

[Magicwand]

IMO, the only only kind of tactic that you could, if you really wanted to, realistically call "cheap" are hamete ones. That is, tactics that can be refuted and will backfire if someone is comfortable with the refutation. Even so, I agree with all the previous points about learning to beat them.
....

hametes are not cheap. it is a skills one must acquire in order to win a game. if hametes are cheap then all handycap games are cheap. weak players are weak because they can not counter hametes. go is a win lose game.
you can play any move within the regulation. basically end justifys the mean.

[gaius]

IMO, the only only kind of tactic that you could, if you really wanted to, realistically call "cheap" are hamete ones. That is, tactics that can be refuted and will backfire if someone is comfortable with the refutation. Even so, I agree with all the previous points about learning to beat them.
....

hametes are not cheap. it is a skills one must acquire in order to win a game. if hametes are cheap then all handycap games are cheap. weak players are weak because they can not counter hametes. go is a win lose game.
you can play any move within the regulation. basically end justifys the mean.

I didn't call them cheap at all! I did say that, if you really want to, there are conceivable arguments for calling them such. Which doesn't mean that you should just figure out how to handle them and deal with it!

However, of one thing I am certain. Hametes are not "skills one must acquire in order to win a game". This may not be your style, but it is quite possible to become very strong without using any trick moves. It is also very possible to win handicap games as white through honest moves. That may not be the strategy that leads to the highest winning percentage, but who cares? Handicap games are for teaching anyway .

[Kirby]

...
However, of one thing I am certain. Hametes are not "skills one must acquire in order to win a game". This may not be your style, but it is quite possible to become very strong without using any trick moves. It is also very possible to win handicap games as white through honest moves. That may not be the strategy that leads to the highest winning percentage, but who cares? Handicap games are for teaching anyway .

When white is faced with a handicap, black has the advantage. If both players play equally, black will obviously win.

In order for white to win the game, this criteria must be met:
Black must make a mistake that puts him behind.

White has two options to make this happen:
1.) Play "honest" moves, and just hope that black will make enough mistakes "naturally" that white can take on the lead.

2.) Play the "dishonest" moves, in hopes that black will make enough mistakes that white can take on the lead.

Of course, there are different styles of play, but making the situation complex might lead to a greater chance of a mistake by black. It probably helps a person to win more handicap games.

---

As Magicwand said, you can play any move within regulation. So calling moves "honest" and "dishonest" are just classifications that people make of moves that they think can or cannot work.

When you are playing a handicap game, it's quite possible that the weaker player has less chance of making a mistake if you play normal moves than if you play the so-called "dishonest" moves, which a weaker player may not know how to handle.

---

I also think that this is a good thing. If a weaker player cannot refute the "dishonest" moves that the stronger player plays, there may be some knowledge that the stronger player has, which the weaker player does not have. Facing such "dishonest" moves can help the weaker player to acquire this knowledge.

[gaius]

Kirby: in handi games, it's almost inevitable for white to overstretch his position a little, and to play a bit more aggressive than what's probably reasonable. A little trickiness is usually good for your winning percentage too, plus it's fun! All I was saying is that it's not necessary to use tricks to win. In my experience, the conventional handicap is too low anyway - ie. if I play a 7 stone game against a 7 kyu (ostensibly, proper handicap), then I can win comfortably over 50% of the games if I use every trick I have and go all out for the win. On the other hand, if I view play somewhat honte ('honest' was meant as a literal translation of honte), I can probably still win around 50%. Also, handicap games are not suitable for serious competition anyway, so I usually don't care too much about the winning percentage. It's better to play interesting moves .

Of course if my goal is to put the other guy at 9 stones + 50 reverse komi, I will not use my 'sensei style' any more - then it's time to resort to the dark side of the force .

[Kirby]

...All I was saying is that it's not necessary to use tricks to win...

Agreed. It takes some faith to trust that your opponent will screw up when you are faced with a high handicap. On the other hand, it takes some faith that they will screw up with your tricks, as well

I guess it's up to the player to decide which brings about less risk, since at the beginning of the game, white's in a losing position.