No One to Blame But Yourself

A couple of days ago I did something I haven't done in a long time, I played a game of chess (three to be precise). Chess is an interesting game in that there is absolutely no luck involved, both players always have all information about the game state and what moves are possible available at all times;so when you lose it is entirely your fault.

I lost both of the first two games due to a mixture of not having played for a while and also when I did last play it was against novice opponents, which meant I had gotten use to the types of moves and mistakes that these players make and as such made poor and/or risky moves expecting them to work anyway. When it came to the third game I had finally come to the realisation that I couldn't just walk it in and would actually need to pay attention and think. I'm pleased to say that doing so got me a win and also made me think about a couple of things.

The first was how you can get into the habit of playing your opponent rather than the game. I often see this in Magic the Gathering (yes another Magic story), were new players despair at being paired against top ranked played, and then the way they play comes to reflect a feeling of inevitability about the game. Sometimes a lack of experience works in a player's favour as they don't notice when their opponent is representing a threat, make an attack a more experienced player wouldn't, and end up winning as the stronger player was bluffing.

The second thing I was thinking about was whether being black or white was an advantage, as each time one of us won we were playing black. In general, the consensus is the opposite of what we observed with white being considered to have a slight advantage (usually somewhere in the vicinity of a 52-56% win rate), but this only applies to high level players who make few mistakes. This issue of a player going first or second being advantageous is found in many games. In Go black, which has the first move, is given a points penalty to balance out the advantage of playing first. While in Magic the starting player is penalised by having to skip their first draw step. Even in games of pure chance there can be an advantage to going first, for example in Snakes and Ladders if each player rolls identical numbers throughout the game (while this is unlikely the average of their die rolls will be similar) the player that went first will win.

Ultimately what I really learnt from playing chess again was that without regular practice, against players of a similar or slightly higher ability than you, your skills become rusty and your play level decreases.