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Lessons from Monte Carlo

by Matt Cohn-Geier
27 August 2010

Matt Cohn-Geier

As I play more tournaments, I notice that I tend to be in the winner's circle more often when I feel I am playing better. An odd little curiosity but one that I have found to be borne out by experience.

After the World team lost to the Danes at Nordic, I decided that I was going to win Monte Carlo. Everything looked good for awhile. The problems started when I lost my second round in the main. That was going to make winning the event a very difficult proposition.

I never really felt like my game was "on" the whole weekend. Although I can't win every tournament, I can always take some lessons away with me. The first and the most important lesson I took from Monte Carlo was while I was still alive in the consolation, long before the event was over: I need to play better. I should never be at a loss as to what to do.

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Subject: Re: Lessons from Monte Carlo

From: Timothy Chow

Date: 27 Aug 2010 19:35 EST

Excellent article as usual. I'm a little confused about Position 3, though; from your verbal description it sounds like you're on the bar but that's not what the diagram shows.

The variant Position 4 is very instructive.

For Position 5, I wonder if part of the reason so many people thought it was a take is that the bots (well, GNU at least) seem to like taking these kinds of positions on evaluation. I don't know about this particular position, but I've run into a fair number of other positions like it (on the bar against a 5-point board but it looks like your opponent may still be slowly bringing checkers around by the time you enter) where GNU 2-ply thinks it's something like a 0.2 take when a rollout shows it's a 0.2 pass.

By the way, do you happen to know the position that Falafel and Svobo played for 5 years? If you do, could you please post the GNU and XG id's? Thanks.

Subject: Re: Lessons from Monte Carlo

From: mattcg

Date: 27 Aug 2010 22:57 EST

I entered with some nondescript number (41 or 51 or something) after my opponent rolled 55 hitting on my 10 point. So I am not on the bar in Position 3.

Here's the prop Falafel & Svobo played:

XGID=-a----DaC---cCA--cAebB---A:0:0:-1:00:0:0:3:0:10

4Dm4EEOwz8FBIA:MAEAAAAAAAAA

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