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How to play with people who are better than you

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Re: How to play with people who are better than you

#181

Post by tluyben2 »

dragontamer wrote: post #147
tluyben2 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I don't find some games fun anymore if you or anyone around the table goes in for the kill; simple example that most people will know; monopoly. There are strategies to almost surely win but it makes the game boring and even annoying for everyone involved. So we usually added rules to prevent those strategies. If someone 'is better at that' it means he/she is a boring/non-fun player and no-one will play anymore a…

> And I don't find some games fun anymore if you or anyone around the table goes in for the kill; simple example that most people will know; monopoly. Monopoly is a bad game though. Play Acquire instead.

I am not like some kind of avid Monopoly player; I play a game on a dead rainy sunday afternoon at family gatherings. They won't have Acquire etc. They have scrabble, monopoly and a bunch of other older but very well known games.

Re: How to play with people who are better than you

#182

Post by Doxin »

vnorilo wrote: post #49

The handicap in Go [1] works amazingly well. I have had enjoyable games with dan-level players despite being at best conversant at the game. That said, I've also enjoyed such games immensely with no handicap, despite no prospect of winning at all. In most games you can have some partial success and psychological reward despite losing the game. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handicap_(go)

The thing that makes go fun for me even while losing is that if you lose the whole game you've still got a lot of smaller skirmishes that you've either won or learned from. Losing a skirmish in go makes it very easy to go "Well what should I have done differently here?" and come up with a good answer.

It's different from a game like risk in that way. If you lose a skirmish in risk there's basically nothing you can learn from that since the amount of random involved just obscures any influence you have yourself. At the end of a game of risk I'm sat there having no idea what I did wrong, and no idea how to do better next time.

Re: How to play with people who are better than you

#183

Post by logfromblammo »

Tarsul wrote: post #172
logfromblammo wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not aware of any move that makes it impossible for any one player to win Settlers of Catan , while still extending the game to 2.5 hours. There are at least four basic strategies that work to win, and it's nearly impossible to block all of them to the other players while still pursuing one yourself. I have seen people win without ever building a third settlement.

i think the point of the parent is that the settlement phase at the start of the game can be pretty decisive. E.g. some people always choose crossroads with numbers that have low probably (like 11 or 3) or with only 2 aligned fields (instead of 3). Of course, you might still win the game but you're problaby too annoyed about your decisions in the first 5 minutes of the game than playing and having fun (and having a c…

If you choose a weak starting position, it's not going to take 2.5 hours for your opponents to win in Settlers of Catan. But if you do have an obviously weaker board position, no one will put the robber on your 2, 3s, 11s, or 12, except in rare situations. That's part of the built-in handicapping for those with obviously stronger board positions. Those 5/36 rolls don't actually produce 5/36 of the time, because most of the time the robber is blocking one of them.

If you choose a weak initial position, the expansion-first player gains an advantage over the city-first player, especially in a 3-player game. And they will both know that your only option is a card-first stealth victory. The latter is usually only viable in a very balanced 4-player game.

If you don't understand probability for 2d6 dice rolls, yeah, you're going to have a bad time in a lot of games, some of them lasting 2.5 hours or more. And if you haven't bothered learning that, why would you learn from the stronger opponents that you play?

Re: How to play with people who are better than you

#184

Post by ProZsolt »

bitL wrote: post #40

"With ‘fairness’ built in, everyone has an equal chance of winning without compromising their playing style." This must be a joke, right? What's the point of playing games? To feel good about oneself?!

This is a poor choice of words. It should be "everyone has a chance of winning". I really like playing board games and because of this, I'm usually the better player when playing with my family. With the balances, I still win most of the time because of the better strategy, but the others still win enough time that they keep playing with me.

Re: How to play with people who are better than you

#185

Post by oAlbe »

DrScientist wrote: post #127
WhompingWindows wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think you can tackle Messi without committing a foul? Keep in mind he's a stereotypical small striker, very high speed and acceleration, he dodges world-class athletes routinely...

By no means every time, but actually sometimes yes. If you look at professional teams, most of the time defenders win the 1:1 battle. That's why in 90 minutes a win of 3-0 is a good score! Obviously in an actual game, it's more complex than that - a lot of defending is about denying opportunity to shoot rather than out and out tackling. I reckon I could get in the way on occasion... Remember the attacker has the disa…

This reminds me of that viral survey that went around not long ago asking people if they thought they could win a set against Serena Williams and the result being a huge amount of responders saying yes.

Unless you played soccer at least semi-professionally in some small league team for at least some part of your not so distant past, there is just no way you are gonna win a 1v1 with Messi, either by committing a foul or not.

If you watch some scrim games during the off season, you can find games were a top tier team plays against minor-er league teams, and you can see the difference in skills. It's like they play two different games.

Re: How to play with people who are better than you

#186

Post by WhompingWindows »

DrScientist wrote: post #127
WhompingWindows wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think you can tackle Messi without committing a foul? Keep in mind he's a stereotypical small striker, very high speed and acceleration, he dodges world-class athletes routinely...

By no means every time, but actually sometimes yes. If you look at professional teams, most of the time defenders win the 1:1 battle. That's why in 90 minutes a win of 3-0 is a good score! Obviously in an actual game, it's more complex than that - a lot of defending is about denying opportunity to shoot rather than out and out tackling. I reckon I could get in the way on occasion... Remember the attacker has the disa…

Unless you were a college level athlete, I doubt you'd even be able to stop Messi from doing whatever he wanted ONCE in 100 plays. I was a sweeper for 10 years and I don't have any illusions that I could stop him from doing anything.

I don't know you but come on, we're talking about the 2nd greatest living striker (Ronaldo is first IMO) out of the most popular sport for 8 billion people, and you think you could hold a candle to him? After he has repeatedly embarassed the worlds' most athletic, well-studied and trained defenders?

Re: How to play with people who are better than you

#187

Post by WhompingWindows »

oAlbe wrote: post #185
DrScientist wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By no means every time, but actually sometimes yes. If you look at professional teams, most of the time defenders win the 1:1 battle. That's why in 90 minutes a win of 3-0 is a good score! Obviously in an actual game, it's more complex than that - a lot of defending is about denying opportunity to shoot rather than out and out tackling. I reckon I could get in the way on occasion... Remember the attacker has the disa…

This reminds me of that viral survey that went around not long ago asking people if they thought they could win a set against Serena Williams and the result being a huge amount of responders saying yes. Unless you played soccer at least semi-professionally in some small league team for at least some part of your not so distant past, there is just no way you are gonna win a 1v1 with Messi, either by committing a foul…

Yeah exactly, the pride of this person is just silly. Unless he played at a top D-I school and did very well, there's no way he could successfully tackle the ball from Messi in 100 tries...I'd give a solid D-I defender a couple of tackles on Messi in all of those 100, the rest Messi would just easily dodge away, control the ball, create space, and then burn them or pass away from the inevitable double team.

It's like me in my 5th year of coding claiming I could out-code Linus Torvalds...like what?!?!

Re: How to play with people who are better than you

#188

Post by wufufufu »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #14
dragontamer wrote: post #4

Playing with people who are better than you is easy. Just accept they're better than you and keep losing. Decide if you are comfortable with your current skill level or not. If you want to get better, train up. If you are happy with your skill level, then keep losing. That's fine, and I think its healthy to decide to place limits on your skill. Skill is an infinite treadmill: you can continuously get better at pretty…

> If you want to get better, train up. This doesn't mesh with why lots of people play things. It's play. It might just be a nice way to pass the time. I would rather play basketball against someone my level than Steph Curry playing all out. I'm not playing to win or even to get better (getting better is fun, but isn't the point). I just want to have fun. For many kinds of play, if you have to train for it, you may as…

Yea there are people who enjoy the act of training and people who do not. Personally I'm the former but it's easy to understand why people don't want to turn a game into work.

Re: How to play with people who are better than you

#189

Post by lapnitnelav »

forgetfulusr wrote: post #93
lapnitnelav wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I play a fair amount of a regular scale FPS (12v12 max) and it happens fairly regularly that I end up being the last one alive in my team and have to face off multiple opponents. I don't always succeed but the pure thrill of trying to survive what is usually a virtual death sentence is something really powerful and when successful so exhilarating.

Have you tried BR(battle royale) games? PUBG gets my heart racing too much. I also like that it mixes you in with both pros and amateurs. Not knowing the skill level of the player you are exchanging shots with keeps everyone on their A game.

Yeah I have but this isn't the setting for my play-style which tends to overanalyze. So small scale battle is my jam.

Re: How to play with people who are better than you

#190

Post by narag »

ulysses wrote: post #144
narag wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learned chess playing always against a friend that won every single time. I didn't give up. I joined a club and improved. After some months I played again with my friend and I won. That was the last game he played against me. Moral? Not sure. I like to win sometimes, but I don't mind losing most times if that teachs me something. Playing against someone much better than you sharpens your perception, reactions, ever…

The part where your friend stopped playing you -- that's something that I just don't understand, on a fundamental level. My brother-in-law talked about chess for years, I finally agreed to play him, and won both games. He's never brought it up again. It makes no sense to me. Growing up, I was the youngest, so I generally lost at whatever games we played, and it never made me want to stop playing. When my significantl…

This guy is the most stubborn person when learning something that you can find. I lent him a book on flamenco guitar (that I lost hope to recover :) and he actually run through it and learned to play it like a pro. He's short but won a position as firefighter. Now he improved his English, took a sabbatical and is touring south-east Asia with a backpack.

Probably he was just diving in his next obsesion at the time.

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