aesche wrote: ↑12 April 2022, 21:38
Would you allow something at a RL table or not? Only with or also without the same helper being directly available to all players at the table?
Back when I competed in a 10-member fantasy football league, we’d all come in on Draft Day with different cheat sheets. Some might carry printouts from ESPN, others from CBS or Fantasy Pros. I always brought in a handwritten sheet, based on my own work. While some would kiddingly peek over my shoulder at my notes and I’d feign hiding them, no one ever fussed about actually getting to see them….even though I won 3 championships over the 5 years I was there. I think they got a kick about the over-the-top work I put in.
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As far as chess goes, a cheatsheet can only take you so far. I don’t think it would be that uncommon for the best move in a unique, complicated middle game position to be a play that “breaks the rules” of what a cheatsheet would generally advise. If a BGA member’s ELO reaches “strong player” status…especially in chess, it’s not going to be because of any cheatsheets that might be in their possession.
There are some games on BGA where I’ll refer to dice probability charts frequently and I expect that my opponents will be doing so too. But these charts are just a stepping stone to what really makes the difference between defeat or victory. That’s because BGA offers so many games that put you in difficult, prickly, and unique situations where you have to call on all your skills and stamina to assess and assimilate all the different details and factors that are going on in a game-specific situation (factors that are often pulling you in opposite directions) and cobble together plays you can be comfortable with. The dice charts are just a quick input to the custom made probability calcs, decision trees, and projected-course-of-play diagrams that one can construct to deal with the specifics of the situation at hand. When the game is over, the dice charts are instantly ready to serve you in the next. But the custom-made analysis that really made the difference for the victory expires at the end of that game because the details and events of the next game will be so profoundly different. That’s why I wouldn’t sweat using dice probability charts, even if you’ve charted yours a little more thoroughly than the reference version. ELO doesn’t measure your tools, it measures your skills.
I couldn’t help here but supply a little input from the world of golf. Here are a couple of quotes from Jack Nicklaus’s autobiography:
While winning the U.S. Amateur in 1959, Jack was struck by the regimen of one of his opponents in match play, Gene Andrews.
“Perhaps his greatest eccentricity was the painstaking use of notebooks, compiled during practice, containing highly detailed distance charts, plus meticulous contour maps of all the putting surfaces.”
A couple years later Jack would take the Amateur title again at Pebble Beach but not without some challenges.
“In practice, the Pacific blustery winds, combined with firm fairways and greens, had been giving me fits on approach-shot yardages. When I mentioned the problem to my friend Deane Beman, he responded, “Then why don’t you measure them like me?” As Gene Andrews had been doing for many years, savvy little Deane had by then ingrained the habit of pacing off and noting yardages, while I and almost everyone in the amateur game – and most of the pros, also – continued to rely on visual estimating. Taking Deane’s advice, I found that the more yardages I paced off, the more greens I hit and the closer I got to the cups.”
This became a hallmark of Nicklaus’s career, arriving early at a course to practice it and learn it and take the time to walk off the yardages. Wikipedia says “Nicklaus was the first player to chart and document yardages on the course on a consistent and planned basis.” For a game with such a fussy reputation like golf, where they’ll disqualify a player for innocently signing an incorrect score card, this practice of walking off the yardages was not regarded as cheating.
If Nicklaus could document the yardages, I’d say you could chart the probabilities for Dragonwood beyond just the first 5 dice. You’re not cheating but simply making an effort to learn the game in greater depth than the next guy.