I remember something Kit Woolsey wrote about years ago regarding 4-away scores. A one point difference in a match matters more when the match is short. You'd rather be ahead 2-away 3-away than 11-away 12-away.
And when the modern bots came out with their match equity tables determined by rollouts, this heuristic held of course. Except in one case it's flipped. You'd rather be ahead 4-away 5-away than 3-away 4-away!
4-away is particularly nice. Obviously if it's a choice between being 3-away and 4-away, you'd always choose 3-away, but the gain from getting to 4-away is bigger than you'd think and the gain from going from 4-away to 3-away is smaller than you'd think.
Edit: ooh found the article --
http://www.bkgm.com/articles/GOL/Jan01/sneq.htm
Last edited by _Z_; 02-20-2019 at 02:04 PM.