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Avoid blundering: 80% of a winning strategy

longform.asmartbear.com

211–220 of 228 posts

Re: Avoid blundering: 80% of a winning strategy

#211

> the player who committed more blunders lost 86% of the time In some sense this is almost tautological. While finding an exact definition for a chess blunder isn't straightforward, here is one example from the Lichess UI: https://github.com/lichess-org/lila/blob/b527746b179cdde6438... Basically, if you make a move which decreases your winning probability more than 14% over the best move, that's a blunder. But winnin…

The "don't blunder" advice applies to sports as well, where you hear it phrased in non-tautological ways frequently, typically something like "you need strong foundations."

Even at the peak of college level, I remember winning and losing games because someone did something that you mostly stopped doing soon after learning the sport, like pass to a teammate who wasn't looking, or fumble the ball in a preventable way, or things like that. Some teams focused on fancy plays and corner cases while their fundamentals still failed frequently, leading to more losses due to bad fundamentals than than wins due to good advanced plays.

That's how I read the "blunders" stuff. There's some small set of a priori known foundations you need which are fairly simple to keep from going wrong, which nonetheless lead to a large portion of failures/points given up/whatever.

Re: Avoid blundering: 80% of a winning strategy

#212
post #89

> the player who committed more blunders lost 86% of the time In some sense this is almost tautological. While finding an exact definition for a chess blunder isn't straightforward, here is one example from the Lichess UI: https://github.com/lichess-org/lila/blob/b527746b179cdde6438... Basically, if you make a move which decreases your winning probability more than 14% over the best move, that's a blunder. But winnin…

It's not tautological, though. Your position can gradually deteriorate until it is not salvageable anymore. In that situation we say that the opponent outplayed you. The fact that the switches in probability occur suddenly is highly relevant. One reason for this could be, that you are able to avoid this type of mistake 90% of the time. So during 9 out of ten moves, nothing changes. Then it does. So in this model, avo…

However isn't it essentially saying 'You can do everything right and lose, but it's pretty rare compared to making lots of mistakes and winning.'?

Re: Avoid blundering: 80% of a winning strategy

#214

Totally unrelated side note, but I was in car sales for almost a decade and was better than top 1% nationwide basically since the first year. Averaging 34 cars a month when national average is 11. People always asked for advice and in general my advice was "don't shoot yourself in the foot". Actual particular style or methods aren't that important because whatever style you have will work on some and not on others, s…

Turns out "get the hell out of the way" is very good baseline advice for a lot of situations. Want to make a sale? Get a customer in the room with a good product, then get the hell out of the way. Want your team of engineers to build incredible things? Hire good people, then get the hell out of the way. Its not perfect, it hinges a lot on starting from a good place, but if you're in a situation where everybody in the…

I hope you don't mind. I just took your idea, had chat GPT write an airport book about it, slapped "Get the H*ll out of the way!" on the title and sold it to Harper Collins for $1M.

Re: Avoid blundering: 80% of a winning strategy

#215

"Slow is smooth and smooth is fast" This applies to software engineering and I've had a hard time explaining it to people throughout my career.

Arrogance. We believe our domain is singular and concepts and wisdom don’t translate from other specialties.

Re: Avoid blundering: 80% of a winning strategy

#216

Once he started talking about chess, I knew it was going to be a limited view on things. There are 2 kinds of games: those that punish mistakes very badly, and those that reward exploited opportunities very richly. I was never good at games like chess because of this exact same reason: I don't cover all my bases and lose from a stupid oversight. However, I'm pretty good at poker, because I know how to exploit an oppo…

As an intermediate Go player, you are given a handicap that your opponent spends the game chipping away. They are on the defensive from move 1, and they have to counterattack. Mostly this comes by making a move that defends against your last move, but puts you in retreat. The game shifts from them answering you to you answering them.

Re: Avoid blundering: 80% of a winning strategy

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not GP, but perhaps this is the post: https://longform.asmartbear.com/two-big-things/

thank you. also, what does "GP" mean in this context? mistyping of "OP"?

No problem. And I’m delighted to find out that there is actually an Ask HN to answer your question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8363625

So in our case here, GP is nocoiner.

Re: Avoid blundering: 80% of a winning strategy

#218
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minimum FIDE rating is 1400, so you really cannot be 800 FIDE. Also the gap between online and FIDE ratings is closer than people think.

That’s not correct, as of 2022: They only publish numbers above 1000, but they still come up with a number before deciding to not publish it. https://www.fide.com/docs/regulations/FIDE%20Rating%20Regula... Not all clubs follow those rules exactly, but you still need to track sub 1000 to know when people cross it.

It is since new rating regulations, which are in effect as of 2024: https://handbook.fide.com/chapter/B022024

See 7.1.2. Ratings aren't tracked by clubs even when players are under this cutoff - all games for rating are submitted to FIDE.

Re: Avoid blundering: 80% of a winning strategy

#219
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the context of startups, everyone's at beginner level. For auto racing (whether sim or real), the #1 rule has always been "To finish first, first you must finish", which, as I see it, is a direct "make no blunders before worrying about a podium finish".

> In the context of startups, everyone's at beginner level. Why would this be true? There are plenty of startup veterans that have been doing it for years.

You're quite correct, it was an oversight on my part. It's too late to edit my post now, but at least this thread will be a record of me disagreeing with my original point :-)

Re: Avoid blundering: 80% of a winning strategy

#220
post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

also: A lot of recipes are absolutely terrible. That included internet recipes but also recipes by renowned chefs and whatnot. There seems to be some sort of evolutionary pressure for over complicating recipes out the wazoo. E.g. when trying to find a recipe for a vegetable lasagna, and skipping all the incomplete recipes, you end up with a recipe that involves 10 ingredients, involves a pan, a couple of bowls, an ov…

Can you share your recipe? I would be interested in in one that doesn't require any prep. I assume you have to cut _something_ though?

The prep consists of mixing the ingredients, and layering it with the lasagna sheets.

Basically you mix 50/50 of pre-cut spinnach from a jar, I use the small jars, and premade spaghetti sauce, add about the same amount of cheese as you've added spinnach. I use shredded gouda but I'm sure whatever mildish cheese you can get locally would work. Mix in cream cheese with herbs and two or three heaping teaspoons of pesto. Then you layer this sauce alternating with the lasagna sheets. No need to pre-soak the lasagna sheets, but make very sure they are covered all around with sauce or you end up with hard bits. Bang in the oven at 190c for 40ish minutes.

You'll have to adapt the recipe to what you can find locally, but as most of it's is pre-made stuff from jars there's very little prep. If you want to get fancier about it you can of course substitute jars for hand-cut ingredients instead. In my experience the most crucial ingredient is the pesto. Too much and it's overpowering, too little and the lasagna turns out bland. The rest of the ingredients are quite unspecific in how much exactly you use. I don't measure anything really when making this.

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