Ok, after taking a nap, I now realise that pretty much the only scenario where the other play works out better is if there are at least two 5s and exactly two 6s in the last two racks. There might be some really awkward decision in rack 7 however you play rack 6, so those probably cancel out. But I would guess exactly two 6s and at least two 5s is less likely than all other scenarios combined. Shouldn't try to play tc when too tired, not the only mistake I made when playing earlier.

As for Gabe's score, it is visible on the player page, you can see the board. Pretty sure this is a known problem, but it just matters so rarely that it hasn't been a priority fix. Anyways, if lilrascal wants to play it fair, should not go to Gabe's player profile.

Yup

Might be wrong, but it feels like I'm running pretty hot at crabshoots, holding my own against th10 but obviously still road kill in The Bigs.

I'll play it straight when I get home this evening and playing my normal style except taking my time to hopefully not make stupid mistakes like I'm prone to do when I rush. I'd love to finally break the 50k mark.

Afterwards you can point out my mistakes here so I can hopefully learn from them.

I'll give you a tip.

3s are not your main chain

I had a decision in rack 8 and choose right

Maybe just tell him what # game it was so he won't level himself crazy with all the other boards. It's not like we're talking about a 60k score here so I don't think anyone would mind if you let the kid go for a personal record.

I like the kid part. I haven't heard that in a long time being in the 50+ club in age. LOL

The laughing can now begin. Only scored 28474 on the game.

Actually, some constructive criticism would be appreciated. I've played the game as a puzzle several times varying my strategy (but not for planning ahead) and didn't increase my score much.

Well this is awkward since I'm more than 2x younger. You're not a kid in TC terms until I won't have to change your colour in my spreadsheet every 2nd day, just stick with blue, it looks good on you
This was...anticlimatic.
I think there are others who play 1st rack as you do but I think it's a mistake. An even bigger one, if you know there's at least a 33% chance of it becoming a 50k+ game. On 66541, I don't play the 4 next to the middle but rather leave it open diagonally(upper square of the right side or left square of the bottom). The main reason why this is good, is that you leave your setup open to play what is called advanced strategy if the next rack(s) bring a bunch of 6s and 5s. Advanced strategy, is numbered as 5 in this awesome post by Gaby.

Also, I'm not sure what you're doing with the 2s in racks 1-4, Gaby scored the nuts and it's unlikely he placed the 2s like that(though I guess it's likely that a bunch of 2s rolled). A great benefit of advanced strategy is that you can dump one side of the 4s and use the 3 open squares for bonus, as exampled here(you can also play the 2s to the middle and use one square to place three 1s):


Though I might get yelled at here since I think Gaby connected the 2s in rack 3 on the wrong side.

I'm sorry, I keep going back and forth between green and blue. I'd like to have you stop changing me back to green. I play to much by instinct instead of thinking it through.

Sorry, I was hoping to break the 50k barrier.

Thanks for the advice btw. I should work on my game more, rather than just going by instinct, otherwise, I'll never take it to the next level.

This is spot on. I'm not going to name any names but there are players who seemingly have been around for a while now yet their strategy has stagnated and is now horribly outdated. By no means can I assume that these people are somehow dumber than I am, I just think they're the type of people who like figuring stuff out on their own and now are just lazy or whatever. It's like in poker, when you're starting out then it's very beneficial for you if you get handed a standard preflop chart and are told to never open-limp, it's a simple thing which shaves months off of your progression.

I just started looking at how better players play and trying to figure out the whys. (Un)Fortunately, it's still a very complex game with pretty much endless runouts so there will always be spots where you have to go with your intuition.

I looked at your first four racks in the first game of the ongoing big, couple of major points:

Play 2s to the outer squares(outer=where you put your 3s), unless you get at least 4 of them in the first two racks(then do what you did). Aiming two of them in the same box will lead you to all sorts of trouble(as evidenced in the game you had the 50k shot). Having all four outer spaces filled with 2s after the first four racks is a good situation to be in, because if you get a 65542 fifth rack - you can just always fill out your chains and place the 2 to the box that's left(unless it's the middle I guess, but you'll be putting one of the big dies there 90+% of the time).

Don't ditch the 3s on the first rack - if I had to give a single tip to a player starting out, I'd tell him or her to "leave your options available for as long as possible", now there are a handful of spots where you have to pull the trigger(even more so in DCs, I think), but as a general strategy, this is great and one of the biggest things I learnt from The Clash of the Titans.
A 4-zoned chain of five 4s is worth 320 points(times bonus), a 4-zoned chain of seven 3s is worth 336 points(times bonus).
Your first rack was : 63321
Your second rack was: 63321 (I'm not making this up!)

If you played them to the spots I mentioned in my earlier post, you should have a wide range of options: You can go 3 in the middle and 6 to the bottom; you can even go with 3s as your outer chain(I don't think this is that bad, since it saves you from positions where you're likely to make big mistakes and we both would kinda have to take gambles if we're playing against Gaby in a best of 9) or you can ditch them as Gaby did. He didn't end up playing them but I'm sure he was keeping an eye on them and was ending up with a chain of 3s with like 80+% of third racks(it was 66444 so you kinda go mmm 4s). If you play the 3s to the outside, you're also taking spots away from your 2s.

You put the 1s in the same box with your 2nd rack, this is asking for trouble. First of all, you can't place any more 1s in that box for the rest of the game. Secondly, it takes away your freedom and mobility just as I talked earlier with the 2s. You will end up having to search for your chain dies(3s,4s,5s or 6s) to place in that particular box rather than placing them in their optimal positions and placing the bonus numbers last. Your goal should be:
Ending up with a single 1 in all four outer boxes if it's unlikely you will go for a rack 9 charmer(meaning needing the middle box to complete a chain).
Ending up with 1s in three squares if it's likely you might need the middle box for a rack 9 completion.

The board of FREEDOM:



The thing that sucks about the snake charmer collection is that it's pretty hard to get a snake charmer. This setup allows you to hold and see what racks come - you need exactly 4 of each 4s, 5s or 6s to 5-zone them, you can wait and see what comes and decide. Get a 65421 5th rack? Go ahead and put the 6 to the bottom, 4 to the right and 5 to the middle. You will still have the possibility to 5-zone whichever two chains easily, whatever racks may come. And if you've placed the 6, 5 and 4, you're left with the 2 and the 1, they're kinda easy to place now that we've spread them out with our first four racks.

Disclaimer: There are a lot of people better than me in this and the awesome thing is that the good players are still willing to talk strategy. I'm looking forward to get put in my place if I said something wrong somewhere and even if people ignore this, I think this is more beneficial than it is hurtful for your game. gl

edit: actually your averages are really good for someone who has played so little, so maybe this is all too basic and you were pretty much just in gambool mode vs Gaby, not sure. There might be someone else who benefits from this so whatever.

Thanks for the advice. I looked at some of the strategy threads early on, but and used some of that to use to work on my game. I've been working playing around with my strategy some with the placement of the 2's on the side and the ends to see what differences it makes (sometimes great, sometimes bad).

I think I've hit a plateau with my game and strategy at this point, thus the blue/green almost daily flip flop. I need to go back and reread the strategy threads. I think I might be able to understand them better now.

I'm always open for constructive criticism. You don't get to my old age without having a thick skin.

I agree with what lenC said already. I wouldn't play the 4 into a setup position in rack 1. That said it isn't terrible by any means to do so. As lenC said, the rack 2 play of 2s isn't ideal. With 2s, as a general rule you shouldn't aim to have 5 unpaired after 4 racks, 3-4 is better. And if you have 5 unpaired, you really don't want to have 2x2 in two zones, that is often gonna make life difficult in later racks. So 2x2 in one zone and three zones with one 2 is much better if you have 5 unpaired, if that sometimes happens by accident, not the worst thing in the world. But here you could've easily avoided having 5 unpaired 2s by making a different play in rack 3. Also agree with lenC about Gabe playing his 2s wrong. So pretty much all the strategy advice in #4460 seems good to me!

As for the game, there are actually some later plays that are really bad imo. The main one comes in rack 4.

This was the situation:


This is what you did:


I'll put this in spoilers so you can think about it yourself before seeing what I'm talking about.


The next one is in rack 5.





As for the long lenC post, it seems mostly solid to me. On the point of not ditching 3s in first rack, I would add that you should probably play them to adjacent zones, which should help later on if you decide to play them.

Also related to leaving your options open, I feel one of the biggest problems people have is not rotating the board, there are a lot of spots where rotating the setup in one way or another would give a lot better option than just looking at it with a tunnel vision of trying to do the familiar thing.

Oh, and lenC, don't sell yourself short. It clearly shows both in your posts and play that you've been putting in time to actually learn the game.

For lenC.

Game 5 of 999.

Rack 4:


I'm not sure if the trouble with 2s affected your decision, or if you wanted to make a "strange" play on purpose. But if you aren't aware of this, purely from a setup pov I feel like there is a better option than what you did in this situation. Don't really think it is worse with 2s either. Solution in spoilers:

Thanks for the advice.

Rotating the board is definitely one of my problems. My main strategy works with a certain rotation, when I have to move off of that I make more mistakes. I have a problem mentally rotating the board in my head. I definitely need to work on that.

As far as the placement of the 1 in the middle early on, I don't know what I was thinking at the time.

That wasn't a deliberate strange play, TH. I just never consider that as a fallback option for some reason. That's immensely better than my decision since I need an extra 3 to snake both 3s and 6s without seemingly any reasonable benefit(hoping for 2 or less 6s is meh).

Also, it looks like I'd have a charmer shot, if I got another 3 instead of a 6 to stick in the middle, once again, something I wouldn't ever consider in real time so I'll need to spend more time on the drawing board.

Instead of creating "The big nineteen", I'm thinking of switching the seeding mechanism to random and creating "The random one".

I've come to prefer random seeding. Using the daily ratings seems to create a lot of rematches.

Any thoughts or objections?


I usually wait until the semifinals of the previous tournament has been reached before starting a new one.

I'd be heartily in favour of striking the Bigs from the history books.

LOL, I currently have the top DC game for today (at the moment).

Dynasty, I'm fine either way. I think the biggest problem is TH screwing up the system, though going with random will only help him in the long run but whatever, let's try it out. I'd prefer to have both obv, but I understand if there's not enough interest.

edited out a part

I made a lol rack 9 error

Fortunately lilrascal made sure it doesn't cost me the win, just some rating points, which I do not care about.

lenC, what's your Triplechain name?

Something you care even less about: you're scoring at least 277 F1 points this month and according to my data(2014 only) that's unprecedented. The previous record was Dynastys 271 in January. Funny how no one can win more than 6 DCs in a month - Dynasty did that in January, velourfog in March, dogfloss in April and now you in May,
wetwilly31, I was stuck in the same 1250-1300 zone for quite a while but luckily I got out of that slump and am now rising pretty rapidly.

It is also better for 4s imo.

Indeed, that is one of the setups found in the charmer chart. The two setups play very differently though. In the charmer setup you'll try to snake 4s through rack 9, with the one that could've been used in 999, you'll usually 4-zone them without blocking other chains, for those lazy enough to not check themself, played like this:



Sometimes you can even snake them, but that does pose some problems, as seen from the image. You'll have to play the other chains in a different way than with just 4-zoning 4s, and also block one of them. I prefer this setup over the charmer one, not a huge fan of setups where you "must" play one of the chains in a way where you require help from rack 9.

Tbf I kind of like what the re-matches bring to the table, creating rivalries of sort, getting a "revenge" for losing the last time. For example I know for a fact that Gabe has thoroughly enjoyed being able to play against me for four 2nd rounds in a row.

There is a problem with the Daily seedings though. Yep, you guessed it, they aren't accurate. There would be a solution to this though... wink wink nudge nudge Zac

I guess I wouldn't be against the change though. Gonna propose an alternative option as well: maybe alternate between creating "big" and "random" tourneys? This would prevent getting the same match-ups every time (unless rng gonna rng), but would keep the "rivalries" alive too. Or maybe alternate for a short period and then switch to random tourneys completely? Like next tourneys: random 1, big 19, random 2, big 20, random 3, random 4 and then random all the time. This last suggestion is based completely on the fact that I would like to have a nice round number of 20 big tourneys in the history books before they are abandoned (assuming that this happens).

Another score EV problem I forgot to post earlier. Idk if people care about these at all, but at least a couple have commented on them, so maybe? The thing about these is that the situations are quite specific, so not that much to learn from these for overall play.

That said here it is:

Options:
A. 3 center, 5 right, 2 top, 1 bottom, 4 left
B. 3 bottom, 5 right, 2 top, 1 center, 4 left
C. 3 center, 5 left, 2 top, 1 right, 4 bottom

Will likely run the math tomorrow evening, so you've got until then to think what you would do, or even post your answer itt!