Spider Solitaire

In response to a comment by black dog barking:

Spider Solitaire is the Devil’s game.

I’m writing about the Windows version, though I’ve tried several other computer variants, and they’re pretty much as bad. Computer solitaire games are in an entirely different universe from the hard copy versions, not least being that they can keep statistics.

The skill-to-luck ratios of solitaires are pretty obvious. “Regular” solitaire, Klondike, in other words, is pretty much a matter of luck, except when you miss a play. There are a few choices during the game, but most often, there is no way to determine whether or not which choice is best. In the Windows (and most other) implementations, the “undo” is severely limited.

Freecell is much more a matter of skill, and most games are winnable. But it’s a full information game, which means that luck mostly doesn’t come in to it, and there’s a ceiling. You can only get so good at Freecell, and most people can get that good, or pretty nearly. You can also replay the same hand, over and over, and they’re numbered in the Windows version, so you can tell your friends about specific deals. At least one of them is unwinnable, I forget the number, but it can be found if you do a web search for it.

Spider has a huge amount of “top,” room to get better and better. It took me probably 20 or 30 games at the beginning before I won my first game at the highest difficulty level, where all four suits are used. Of course, that was before I began to really use the “undo” function. Without the undo, I eventually got a win statistic of slightly less than 10%.

The undo changes that entirely. The Windows version has an undo function that is limited only by each deal from the stock (which happens 5 times per game), or when a suit is formed and moved off the tableau to the foundation. Sometimes forming a full suit can cause you to lose by leaving you in an untenable position, one that you could have gotten out of if you still had the lost suit to play with.

With liberal use of “undo” I can win about 45% of Spider Solitaire hands. But a friend told me that you can Save a game at the beginning, then keep playing the same game over and over again without it counting as a loss by just going to the Open Last Saved Game (“Replay Game” counts as a loss). You can use similar Save tricks to never enter a loss in the statistics, but that’s pointless. Replaying the same game until you either win, get tired of it, or convince yourself that it’s unwinnable, though, that’s a challenge.

I once played a game that had a bottleneck (no possible plays under ordinary conditions) on the third deal; I played it for an entire weekend and found a way to create a play on the third deal that won the game. Amy plays the two suit game and once hit a game that gave no plays on the final deal, which looks like an automatic loser. But it’s possible to put cards underneath the deal that put a dealt card in play (the cards underneath have to be the same suit in sequence so they can be moved as a whole). So I noted the final deal, then played to that final layout and beat it. I’ve done similar things in the four suited game.

I did compile a statistical run of over 400 games with 21 losses; the win statistics were 94%. And there were at least a couple of games in that run that I lost because I’d forgotten to Save the game at first. More recently, easing off my OCD a little, I win about 90%, because sometimes I just get tired and go to bed.

So, we have a really difficult game that rewards pattern recognition and logical thinking by giving a statistical score that other players can find mind boggling.

The Devil’s Game, I’m sure of it. I really should give it up.

Games People Play

During my sophomore year at RPI, I had a housing crisis. I’d moved out to some apartments fairly distant from the campus with a couple of guys, both of whom had cars, and I did not. Actually, one of them flunked out before the beginning of the year, so that left just the two of us, me dependent on him for transportation to and from campus. It was possible to walk the distance, but it was definitely not a fun thing to do when the air temp was hovering near zero, as it did a lot in Troy in the winter.

It also turned out that the two of us ceased hitting it off, something that can happen when you go from being a buddy to a roommate. That’s part of the “education” thing that we hear so much about.

Anyway, long, painful, and somewhat embarrassing story short, in mid-winter I moved out, to a place nearer to campus, on Hoosick Street.

The Hoosick house had been a fraternity and some locals had bought it after said fraternity moved out, with the idea of making it into student housing. I’m pretty sure they hadn’t taken the flunkout factor into account, so when I moved in, there was plenty of room. I got what had been a double room all to myself. The other guys in the place had mostly come from my freshman dorm; that’s how I knew them. So it was back to semi-communal living, only this time with kitchen privileges.

There was a fair amount of mischief to be had in a place like that, and I had some of it, and watched some other people engage in it, and formed my opinions as to which mischief was safer than the other sorts. Good stuff to know. Also, that was the spring of 1970, when Kent State happened, and all other sorts of hell broke loose, so no one was paying attention to the more benign ways of being naughty.

So, loud music, soft drugs, alcohol (the legal drinking age was 18 in NY at the time, so that wasn’t even illegal), various girls running around at odd times, (though not nearly as often as salacious or puritanical minds would like to think), those were some of the activities. Also, there were the ice hockey games in the back yard, in which I did not participate, and the card games in the living room, in which I did.

One was the standard collegiate bridge game: the one that starts sometime on Friday afternoon, and finishes up sometime Monday morning, with no break as such, just people shifting in and out of it. I played fairly intensively for a while, then I gave it up.

I gave it up when I realized that, if I continued to play, all that would happen was that I’d become better at bridge. And nothing else. All playing bridge was doing for me was making me better at playing bridge. Bridge is just a game. So I quit.

On the other hand, there were also poker games, and poker isn’t just a game. Poker deals with probability, deception, and money. Poker is like life. Later, I took up poker on a regular basis, in an attempt to improve my skill at deception, to mediocre results. That has nothing to do with my appreciation for poker, however.

The poker games at the Hoosick house did suffer from the fact that “dealer’s choice” often wound up being some wild card game or another, like baseball where threes and nines are wild. It was about that time that I formulated my rule that any game where a royal flush can lose isn’t poker, and I don’t want to play.

I’ve come to divide games into “just games,” “good games” and “great games.” Like I said, bridge is just a game, though there is a social aspect to it, and if the company is good, it can be a good game. To be sure, some bridge terms are common parlance, like “trump,” “finesse,” and “slam,” but those terms are adapted to bridge; they don’t originate there. Contrast that to poker, where “bluff” originates, along with “busted flush” “inside straight” “ace-in-the-hole” and others. Great games leave their mark on the language, and they leave their mark on lives.

There’s a long standing dispute between chess and go enthusiasts over which is the better, or more profound, game. Both are great games. Chess is complicated, while go is complex. That’s the way I’d put it. But learning either (or both) will sharpen your wits as well as teaching you something about yourself, your opponent, and the very idea of opponent.

From out in left field, I came across a game that’s definitely a good game, and it may be a great game, but I haven’t seen enough examples of it to be sure. It’s a variant of Monopoly, sometimes called Auction Monopoly. In this variant, when you land on a piece of property that is un-owned, it goes up for auction, with the minimum bid being the board-listed price.

Oddly enough, the auction rule dates back to the predecessor of Monopoly, which was called The Landlord’s Game. It was designed and patented by one Elizabeth Magie (thank you, Wikipedia!), based on the economic theories of Henry George, old Mr. Single Tax himself.

With the single rule change, you get a vastly different game from standard Monopoly, because the auction sucks all the money out of circulation pretty quickly. At that point, a serious deflation settles into the game, and prices would drop – except for the price controls, which render most property too expensive for purchase. The first time someone lands on Boardwalk, for example, it almost invariably goes without sale. No one has enough money left to buy it. On the other hand, the winner is usually whoever manages to get the monopoly on Baltic and Mediterranean.

If you allow other rule changes, rules that inject money back into the game again have major consequences (re-inflating the currency), and so forth. I’ve often wondered whether there are other rule changes that would allow for things like fraud, corruption, market bubbles, and so forth, but that’s probably more suitable for computer games, which I seldom play, except for the demon-spawn Spider Solitaire.

Hypermodern

When I was nine I won a friendly chess game at the downtown Nashville YMCA with a guy I was told had once placed second in the city chess tournament. I have no idea if that was true; certainly he shouldn’t have fallen for my strategy, which was a variation of a fool’s mate (and not nearly as quick as one). Assuming that the whole thing was as advertised, I assume that he just wasn’t paying attention to a minor game with a young kid. I will say that afterwards he was surprised and annoyed enough for me to doubt he purposefully threw the game.

Hypermodernism was a chess movement that came to prominence after the end of the first World War. It would probably have been called Modernism (as was so much around that time) except for the fact that its predecessor, a set of rules based on the ideas of the great chess pioneer Wilhelm Steinitz and popularized by the German Siegbert Tarrasch, was called both Classical and Modern chess, thereby really hogging the central real estate in the name department.

That’s what Steinitz’s ideas were all about, as it happens: hogging real estate, most specifically the center of the chess board. Pawns advance down the center, protected by knights and bishops in strong positions. Grind it out, don’t make mistakes, and win by not losing. If Vince Lombardi had played chess, that’s the kind he would have played. Also, if you happened to be stuck with Black, you were pretty much doomed to playing defense.

The Hypermodernists were full of the revolutionary spirit of the times, guys like Richard Réti, Aron Nimzowitsch, Ksawery Tartakower, and Gyula Breyer, all hailing from central Europe (where the aliens landed, to judge by the impact other Hungarians, Austrians, etc. had on the sciences at about the same time). They thought that chess had become boring and they were going to shake it up.

They didn’t dispute that the center of the board was important; they just thought you could control it by some method other than stomping all over it. So they inventing asymmetrical strategies with cool names like the Bogo-Indian defense and the King’s Indian attack, many of which involved deliberate trades of knight/bishop. All the while, the idea was to allow the attacker (generally White) to grab territory, but with a weakness in the attack structure that could be exploited by the more wide ranging pieces.

Part of the reason why it worked was because it was new. When you follow a strategy that is unfamiliar to your opponent, you start with a leg up. In fact, in the 1930s, the Russian chess clique expanded this idea to a more or less deliberate strategy. They played with an eye toward tipping the game into some unusual position that they’d previously studied intensively, but which their opponents almost certainly had not.

It’s sometimes said that chess was designed to sharpen the wits for the battlefield, and the analogies are certainly there. Prior to the Classical/Modern style was the Romantic, which I’ve seen referred to as “swashbuckling,” more than a bit like forms of warfare before it got all tech-y. So grind-it-out Classical is like trench warfare, and you can stretch the metaphor to even include Hypermodern, with the power pieces like tanks and air power.

I’m sure it’s a crappy analogy. I haven’t played serious chess in years, and never at anything like an advanced level. But the more general analogy bears some further thought. It’s easy for any “revolutionary” or “radical” in the early stages, where none of his opponents are expecting his strategies. So he rolls right over the opposition, who blink a few times and try to figure out what hit them. Then, as the victories mount, the opposition builds, but more importantly, it adapts, and analyzes, and waits for an opportunity.

Hitler frequently overruled his generals, and at the beginning, it looked like genius, partly because no one was expecting it, and partly because the nature of warfare had changed with the new weaponry. But eventually he got himself locked into a grind-it-out bloodbath with the Russians, and that was the end of him. The new weapons didn’t help much at all when it came down to just swapping men, even at premium exchange rates.

Politics is war carried out by other means and the same rules apply. You can break the rules and win for a while just because you’ve broken them. But eventually, either the reasons for the old rules present themselves, or the new thing becomes the new rules. Either way, you don’t take anyone by surprise any more.

Brittle Strategies

"The wind does not break a tree that bends" - Sukuma proverb (Africa)

I remember one session near when I first began the practice of Aikido. The attack was shomen uchi, an overhand strike to the head. The response was ikkyo, which translates to “technique number one,” where you control the elbow of your attacker, deflecting his strike into a circular motion that either breaks his balance backwards (the omote form), or opens a hole into which he spirals for a fall (ura form).

My partner and I were both young and strong and cranked on adrenaline. There is a tendency in those circumstances to block the strike straight on, taking the force of it onto your forearm, even directly onto the boney part. The adrenaline shields you from the pain. It all feels so tough and manly.

The next day, of course, both my arms were black and blue, from the striking edge of my hand up nearly to the elbow. Even so, we were lucky. Either of us could have broken a bone in our hands or arms. It happens.

Needless to say, I don’t train like that these days.

I’m not sure when I first began using the phrase “brittle strategy,” or even the circumstances. It was probably about politics, but it might have been about a business practice, or a legal maneuver, or even about war or the martial arts. There are brittle strategies in almost every endeavor.

It’s an evocative phrase; others have also used it. Google tells me that there are 27 instances (then proceeds to show 42; is something up with Google?). One of those instances is me (will this essay make two, I wonder?)

It’s obvious what "brittle strategy" means: a strategy that breaks rather than compromising. In metallurgy, brittleness means stiffness without the ability to deform, to absorb shocks.

In a brittle strategy, there is no Plan B.

The things we think of as most brittle often present a hard face to the world, but they contain inner stresses. If you drip molten globs of glass into water, you may get “Prince Rupert’s Drops,” teardrop shaped bits of glass that will withstand a hammer blow on the head, but mere finger pressure on the tail will cause it to explode into powder.

Our culture is permeated with tough guy talk and words that attempt to convey strength and power. More powerful than a locomotive. It’s the strongest relief you can buy without a prescription. Ram tough. Super-strong. Empowered. Rugged, with the power you need to get the job done. Shock and awe.

Failure is not an option. It is an outcome.