Monday, February 13, 2006

Winning othello strategies

I've just been looking at my games from the weekend, using Zebra the othello program. Oh, and hey, it's called Zebra because it's about black and white, I suppose. I never thought of that before. Anyway, I'm still none the wiser as to why I did so terribly on Sunday and so comparatively well on Saturday (I beat Josbert van der Zande, Elisabetta Vecchi, Roman Kraczyk and Roel Hobo, who are all better than me). I tend to just make moves up as I go along - there's some kind of analysis going on in my mind, but it's generally a pretty subconscious kind of thing. When I sit down and go through a game, I generally have no idea why I made a particular series of moves, whether the computer says it's genius or insanity.

I'm still planning to try memorising oodles of positions and correct moves, but I have no idea when I'm going to fit that into my busy schedule. Training for the WMC comes first until September at least. Unless I get bored with it.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Ah, "planning to try"... I feel much the same every time I get behind in the opening stages. I've created a little site at samsoft.org.uk/reversi in order to do something about it, but sadly I seem to find more time to tweak the site than to actually study the openings or other material I've gathered there, hence I'm no further forward when I sit down to play at kurnik.