I mean that a stalemate is a possible with both players playing to win, although not likely.

Suppose so. Usually the attacker can get a 60/40 shot somewhere in there for forward position/break bonus.

Has anybody found a way to start a game as White?  Since the seat order is locked it always makes me black when starting a game.

Start 500 games! You'll start as white eventually.

This has been discussed, but seat one seems likely to go to the person who started the game.

What has recently interested me about Spy v Spy is that the strategy for a tournament is very different than the strategy for open ranked play.

In open ranked games, you can simply play the odds -- it's pretty much always to your advantage to go for the 4v1 or 7v2 attacks (A 3:1 ratio or lower yields less than 50% odds, I believe). This favors a quick and aggressive game strategy.

However, in a tournament setting you're playing enough games such that, statistically, you'll lose a few if you adopt the quick and aggressive (but risky) strategies. And so the winner -- if everyone employs this strategy -- comes down to luck, i.e. whichever player succeeds in more of their risky attacks than the others. So in a tournament, you're better off playing for the long game, building for defense, board position, and planning for a long war of attrition and patience. Arguably, you're also better off doing this in open ranked play, as well, but the time investment to win-ratio improvement is likely not that favorable.

What do you all think?

Off subject: I think it's weird that this is the second post resurrected from the depths today (this one and Thingol resurrected a post from 2 years ago to comment).  You guys are doing some good recreational drugs if you're digging multiple years into the past to find threads to post on.  Bravo and please share....

BorisTheFrugal wrote:

Off subject: I think it's weird that this is the second post resurrected from the depths today (this one and Thingol resurrected a post from 2 years ago to comment).  You guys are doing some good recreational drugs if you're digging multiple years into the past to find threads to post on.  Bravo and please share....

Heh. To be fair, I started this thread way back, so I knew that it existed!

Kjeld wrote:

What has recently interested me about Spy v Spy is that the strategy for a tournament is very different than the strategy for open ranked play.

In open ranked games, you can simply play the odds -- it's pretty much always to your advantage to go for the 4v1 or 7v2 attacks (A 3:1 ratio or lower yields less than 50% odds, I believe). This favors a quick and aggressive game strategy.

However, in a tournament setting you're playing enough games such that, statistically, you'll lose a few if you adopt the quick and aggressive (but risky) strategies. And so the winner -- if everyone employs this strategy -- comes down to luck, i.e. whichever player succeeds in more of their risky attacks than the others. So in a tournament, you're better off playing for the long game, building for defense, board position, and planning for a long war of attrition and patience. Arguably, you're also better off doing this in open ranked play, as well, but the time investment to win-ratio improvement is likely not that favorable.

What do you all think?

To be honest, I completely disagree.

Firstly, in any 1v1 board, if everyone applies the same strategy (same strategy when going first, a possibly different same when going second), then it always comes down to luck. Irrespective of the board. So, that point doesn't imply much about optimum strategy, IMO.

More importantly, this is how I see things:

Unless you want to account for your opponents looking into your strategy in previous games, each game is independent of each other.  Independence also holds in a statistical sense. Which means maximizing your probability of winning the tournament is the same as maximizing your probability of winning each match. i.e. The optimum strategy for the tournament is exactly the same as that for open ranked play, IMO.