 I'm Rim. I'm Scott. And we are the Hoots of Geek Knights. Today we are here to tell you how to play dirty to win. Now, if you do the things that we're about to tell you to do over the next 24 minutes and 30 seconds, I got to warn you, a couple of possibly bad things are going to happen to you. Number one, the air hockey problem. Well, me and Rim are not grand world champions of air hockey, but we do play it more than pretty much anyone we know. And the result of that is that anyone we know other than each other doesn't want to play air hockey with us anymore. Even worse, you're going to start hating your friends because you're going to take your turn in like some board game in 30 seconds. And your friend is going to take a couple minutes. Once you get good at games, a turn that takes a couple minutes feels like a couple centuries. So a big part of this talk, sort of the first thing we're going to get out there is this concept of heuristics. You take nothing else away from this talk today. Take this concept. There are a lot of heuristics out there. There are Wikipedia articles about the concept of heuristics. These are things that people apply in psychology to the real world. Take the first. If there's a bunch of options and you're not sure which one to pick, pick the first one. If there's a bunch of options and you recognize one of them, but you don't recognize the other ones like in a trivia game, pick the one you recognize. It's more likely to be the right one. Now in games specifically, there are two sort of fundamental and different kinds of heuristics. Directional heuristics are one. And these are very simple. This is the idea of when you're playing a game based on what you know right now, what should you do next? Should you take the very stable and safe looking bridge or the very rickety and dangerous looking bridge with two snakes guarding it? I don't know. I don't know. And then there are positional heuristics. These are a bit more complicated. These are harder to figure out. This is when you're playing a game, figuring out how well you're actually doing and who is actually winning. And you might think this is simple. You might just look at the score. You might try to like, oh, whoever's in first place is in first place. But as we all know, this is not the case in games like Mario Kart. In fact, positional heuristics can get incredibly complex. The blue shell is basically the latter in this diagram. What we're about to go through are a whole bunch of heuristics, like Scott said. And if you just do these things, you're going to win a lot of games. Play the meta. Like if there's a meta in a game, you might want to play Bastion. You might love Bastion. Bastion is your favorite character. Guess what? If Bastion's not in the meta, fuck Bastion. Play whatever's currently in the meta you will do better. Yep. You always see pros don't care about playing their favorite character. If they see there's a character that's OP, they use it. They don't care. They care about winning above all else. You must throw away everything else you want in this world. Cut off every last part, except for the part that wants to win. OP meta. If there's a character that's cheesy, that's OP that like everyone's complaining about, that's your sign. Play that one all the time. What about games where it's a pay to win game? Pay to win. Pay the money. Whoever has the most money wins. If it's a pay to win game, you actually want to win. Literally just spend the money so you're guaranteed to win. Now, a lot of times you'll play a game and there'll be some strategy that you can see is there, but it's really complicated and hard to pull off and kind of tricky and there'll be another way to go that's really simple and straightforward. That simple and straightforward way is going to win you the game the vast majority of the time because you understand it, it's easier and you're going to succeed at it. The complicated way it might end up winning more often when you pull it off, but how often are you going to pull it off, right? You might have to reserve that complicated path for when you're against really powerful opponents, but that simple path that's going to beat you every single time. Just go for that and go to the complicated route only when necessary. Extent information. When you play a game, there's information out there. What cards does someone play? How many cards are left in the deck? How much money does everyone have? Keep track of all of that stuff and I mean all. If you're playing poker and you accidentally see someone else's hand, it was their responsibility to hide their hand from you. There are a lot of games where when players score victory points, they hide their victory points behind some sort of shield, but you see people when they score points, there's nothing stopping you from counting all those points and keeping track of them and doing that will only help you win. I know that's really hard. I know that's a lot of effort, but remember, you're sacrificing everything to win including your brain power. You have to go all in. If someone else does that and puts in that effort and you don't, they're going to beat you. You have to do it too. A lot of games, especially games like chess, which are perfect information games, meaning that there's nothing hidden whatsoever and there's not any randomness either, means that you can figure out every single thing that happens in the game. It's just all visible, which means you can usually memorize some sort of pattern. The game is going to start the same and progress the same every single time. If you put in the effort and memorize those patterns, all the possible options that can exist, you're going to recognize those patterns when you play and you're going to memorize the solution and do it and then win. The only way someone will be able to beat you is if they have somehow memorized as many or more patterns than you have and they also recognize what is happening. Again, a lot of effort, but how do you think chess grandmasters become chess grandmasters? They memorize this stuff. If you want to beat them, you got to do the same thing. All right. We all know when the princess bride, the old witch cup has the poison in it deal, right? And then, you know, same thing with rock, paper, scissors, right? Your opponent is always trying to figure out your psychology. Oh, you put the poison in this cup because of this. He's choosing rock because of that. But if you actually did it randomly, they can't figure you out, right? But it doesn't matter if you actually did it randomly or not. If they believe you did it randomly, then there's no, they have no information by which to base their game decisions. They just have to also do things randomly. And if you pretended to act randomly, you got them. And if you did act randomly, you got random odds of getting them, right? That's better than if you didn't act randomly and they knew it, then they could figure you out and now you're in trouble. All right. So in a lot of games, you know, you'll have maybe five or six things to choose from. You're like, which way do I go? Which way do I go? And you'll be sitting there agonizing over which one is the best, right? And it'll take you a long time because you're analyzing each option. But some of those options are just obviously way bad, right? It's like, okay, do I bike over bridge A, bridge B or off the cliff? Well, we know off the cliff is bad. We're just going to think about off the cliff. And now we've only got two things to think about bridge A and bridge B less things to think about, less time to come to a good decision and more time spent finding the right decision. And you know what? Even if you can't figure out if A or B is better, you've eliminated all the obviously bad choices. If you pretend or actually act randomly between those good choices, boom, you just came to an amazingly very good, probably winning decision in a very short amount of time. Mind games, psychology at the table. This is my go to Scott. Leave and tell people I'm doing it at the table and people will still be fooled by it. Someone attacks me in the game and I get hurt pretty bad. I just start getting kind of petulant like, ah, I can't win this game anymore. Stop yet, yet, yet you eliminated me. Whatever. I'll just take my turn until the game's over. When's lunchtime and oh shit, you stop paying attention to me and I won. This works so well. Like I literally convinced people that you've lost and in a game where people can attack each other and they stop attacking you and now no one's attacking you and it's easy to win. Yep. Treat little setbacks like they're a big deal at the table. Act like you're done with the game. Act like you've given up. Don't actually quit, but act like whatever. I'll just do random stuff on my turns till the game ends. Like, or even better, if you're ahead in a game and you are winning but the other players don't quite realize it yet, just get quiet. Just don't say much. Just kind of sink back and let the other players fight with each other and if they ignore you, you'll just win. All right. So some games have a situation in them, for example, Kronodots, where there is a way to just completely end the game and make everyone lose, right? So if the game has such a rule in it, that is preferable to someone else winning, right? It's like what I rather, in a game with me versus rim, what I rather have rim lose, rim win and me lose or both lose. If those are my only two options, obviously both lose is better because then no one else wins, right? So if you are playing such a game and you find yourself in a position where you cannot win, you should instead immediately attempt to make everyone lose, right? It is much better to just cause chaos and ruin everyone else if you yourself cannot be the winner because then at least no one else will be the winner and acting on that threat, pushing that game in that direction might even give you a chance to be the winner if other players spend their resources and actions trying to stop that scenario, that could give you the lead and then you can go back to winning, maybe. Yep, related. If one player is clearly winning and you could stop them, do not stop them, wait till your turns pass and then point out to all the other players that one's going to win. You have to stop them. I can't do anything. It's not my turn. Make someone else do your dirty work. So let's say you're doing well. You're one of those meeples way in the back there in this slide and you have to do something that will help you and someone else. Team up with whoever sucks, whoever's in last place. If I give red points in this game right here, that doesn't matter. Red's not going to beat me no matter what. So anything I do to help red does not harm me at all. If I help any other player, they might beat me, but red can't beat me. Meanwhile, if red helps me, I'm more likely to win. So if team up with whoever's in last place and you can probably win and I don't know why they teamed up with you, but people will do it kind of often for weird reasons, just roll with it, man. Yeah, I mean, you know, if you team up with whoever's in first place and you're in second, you're not going to be able to catch them. You're teamed up with them. But if you team up with last place when you're in second, no one's teaming up with first place, that's going to give you the boost you need to come out ahead and the person you teamed up with, they never had a chance to begin with. And if you're all in last place and one person's way ahead, all of you team up against the first place player to bring them down, to give all of you a chance of catching up. All right. So sometimes it's the end of a game, right? Or the time is running out in a timed game of some sort. And you know, when you're in a winning position in a game, when you're ahead, play it safe. Use strategies that are low risk, but are guaranteed to get you some amount of success. There's no reason, you know, to go, you know, all out when you're ahead with a safe lead, just protect the lead, turtle, turtle, turtle. But if you're behind, if you're losing and time is running out, you need to go high risk, onside kick, pull the goalie, right? Send the goalie and soccer all the way down as a forward, trying to help you kick the ball into the goal, right? Leaving the net totally empty. You know, do whatever crazy thing that would normally be ridiculous and unsafe to do because you've got no chance the game's going to end. Go, go, go. I see a lot of people playing it safe, just like they do the rest of the game when time is running out and they're behind. You're not going to win that way unless you get very lucky. Yep. Losing by one or losing by a thousand in a hockey game is the same. At least in the playoffs. Yeah. So a lot of games, a lot of board games, either go clockwise around the table or counterclockwise around the table or for various reasons, it matters a lot who sits to the left or the right of you or what the turn order is. If you can try to go before players who are better than you and try to go after players who you think are worse than you, because if you go after someone who's worse than you, they are more likely to make mistakes you can capitalize on. If they, if you go before a player who you think is better than you, you can lock down the roads and avenues they might have to attack you or to achieve victory. You tend to have more control over players who go after you in most games. Figure out how the turn order matters and make sure you're sitting in the exact right chair. Likewise, if you're in a tournament, do whatever you need to do to manipulate seeding to get the weakest possible opponents to go deeper in the tournament. Maybe one of the strong opponents will get eliminated and you'll never have to face them. Right. So say you're playing a video game and there's, you know, you can configure things like the FOV or like sensitivity on the mouse or all that stuff. If you're playing a game and the options in the game and the option could help you win, do better. I was that kid in the old days who was playing quick to with all the settings turned all the way down. The brightness was turned all the way up. My SO my FOV was like a sphere. It was ridiculous. But let me see people in the dark made it easier to hit people made my frame rate faster, radically customize as much as you can to give yourself an advantage. It's cheap. It's cheesy. Uh, it's not cheating. It's in the game. It's part of the rules of the game. Yeah. Like in a sport, if there's some sort of fancy equipment you can get that will help you hit the ball farther and golf or swim faster with a fancy bathing suit, buy it. If there's sneakers that help you run a marathon better, buy them, wear them, do whatever you got to do. A lot of games out there are actually sub games. Right. And you'll see, for example, you might play Yahtzee and then you might go and play another game. And that game isn't Yahtzee, but it has a Yahtzee in it. It's like, Oh, this game is Yahtzee plus some other stuff. Get good at the small games like a Yahtzee. And then a whole bunch of other games out there in the world. Suddenly you've already mastered part of them. Right. You sit down at the table. You play a brand new game and you're like, Oh, you know what? Half of this game is Settlers and half this game is Yahtzee. I already mastered Yahtzee and I mastered Settlers. I guess I've mastered this game before. You've even started playing it. Right. Master all the small games individually. And now without even realizing it, you have secretly mastered many, many more games or large percentages of other games. Once you finish a game, figure it out. Actually either talk to the other players or just think back and try to figure out what was the moment I lost or what was the moment I won. When did things change? Why did that player beat that player? Why were there a lot of sheep left over at the end of the game? Actually analyze the games you played. That is one of the most important ways to get good at games because if you lose, you don't know why you lost. You're not going to do anything differently the next time you play. If you win, you don't know why you won. You're going to lose as soon as you play against someone good. Yeah, I noticed this happening a lot is that people will win a game and then the post game for them is to brag or to be a sore winner or other people are sore losers. They don't talk about the game. They just have bad emotional situation between them and then they don't play games a lot anymore because they're not having any fun. If you're playing games against people to win, you need to, while in the game, be competing with each other as hard as you can. But as soon as the game is over, you must cooperate with each other to level all of each other up. Because not only does A that allows you to continue having this friendly competition that allows you to continue leveling up, but you need those stronger opponents to level up your game. When you're helping out your friend suck less at the game, you're also helping you suck less at the game. It's a really good cycle that prevents your also happens to prevent friends from getting mad at you for beating them all the time. Get those pucks in deep and maybe avoid the air hockey problem. That's right. Right after you finish talking to each other about what happened in that game, what went wrong, what went right, who won and why, play again immediately, several times. Practicing makes you better at everything. Games are no exception. You want to get good at games? Play games over and over and over and play lots and lots of different games over and over and over. Every different game you play is going to teach you something new. It'll have new sub games, new combinations of games. People who are good at games, they don't usually only play one and nothing else. Michael Jordan played baseball and he would have been good at it if he stuck with it and there wasn't like a strike. But specifically, if you're trying to get good at games overall, all kinds of games, play tabletop games, because tabletop games are, for a lot of reasons due to the physical limitations of using physical pieces on a table to represent the full game state, they sort of force you to get good at very specific skills. It's like working a very specific set of muscles. So by playing tabletop games, you will get better at Counter Strike. I am not kidding. That is not a joke at all. So what about sports? A lot of what we've talked about really is focused on like the idea of tabletop games. But what about eSports? I don't know about that. How some of these things like are you thinking about strategies like we talked about when you're playing Counter Strike or Overwatch? Are you focusing more on like head clicking skills, dexterity, strength, all those things? Sports have a few specific things you need to do that don't really apply to tabletop or turn-based games. But the concept here, the scientific concept you can read about this more. This isn't just heuristics. This is a little more in-depth. This is the idea of something called fast and frugal heuristics. If you're playing hockey, you can't sit and think, well, there are three people in the offensive zone and Joey Jojo's on the right and OV is in his spot. So in that situation, I should do X, Y, and Z. You can't think that. Do you think all that? They stole the puck and scored. So you've got to develop heuristics that you can calculate almost instantly and intuitively in your own brain. And that is a difficult skill to get to. The main advice is just play these games a lot. Just like exercising. If you play a lot of hockey, you'll generally get better at hockey. But a really, really tricky problem here is that playing does not necessarily guarantee that you will get better. You actually need to analyze the mechanics of your own play. Like if you're playing tennis, watch a video of yourself serving to figure out what is going on, what you're doing wrong. If you're playing Counter-Strike, use some software that will watch you play and tell you, oh, turns out you can't shoot for shit or, oh, it looks like your problem is it takes you too long to click on the head. Yeah, I use this software and it told me that, yeah, actually you're very accurate with your head clicking. You're just really slow at it. And the pros, while they're actually less accurate, they kill you before you even fire one bullet because you're aiming too carefully. So I learned something and I still suck. But then there's one step further. Many people, especially salty people, the people who are like silver tier in a competitive game, and they should be gold, but their teams always suck. Play and training are different things. Play, you're playing the game. Training, you're doing drills. You're shooting the same guy around the corner a thousand times in a row. You're running back and forth across the football field. If you want to be good at games that are sports, you can't just play. You also have to train. Training alone will not help you. There's a reason there are professional coaches, both in sports and in esports. Much like the Brinksmanship situation where, you know, rather have everyone lose than you win. Having a tie, well, no one really loses or wins in a tie. But if there's some way where you can force a situation where it will be a tie, that is better than losing. And everyone always thinks the best one, tic-tac-toe. If you go first in tic-tac-toe, yeah, you could win. But at worst, you could tie. Well, you're going second in tic-tac-toe. You could lose or you could tie. Make the tie happen. The tie is better than losing. Now we're getting a little edgy here. What if you get the other player to quit? What if you just take so long on your turn? What if I've won like a game of advanced wars or civilization against Scott, but Scott just won't quit? I might get so bored that I quit myself and then technically Scott wins. Yeah, look at the rules of the game. Some games are horribly broken and have things in their rules that are really quite infuriating and allow for some quite unique possibilities, right? If you take advantage of those possibilities, even though you haven't actually won the game, you don't need necessarily win. You just need to get everyone else to quit in frustration. And because it's like, well, it's not my fault, it's the game's fault, right? B, don't play those games. They're broken. But if you are playing such a broken game, take advantage of the brokenness, get everyone else to quit, and then you can declare yourself the winner. The easiest way to win games is to play against people who suck. If you only care about winning, then go play Counter Strike with a bunch of bronze tiers and you'll have a real good time. Yeah, now you're technically, in one sense of the word, when you smurf, you're winning, right? Because you're declared the victor of the game. But when you think about the bigger picture, it's like, what have you won, right? If I beat some kids in baseball, some like little league T-ball kids, what does that say about me, right? It's like, yeah, I beat them. Great, right? It's like, you need to use the rest of the strategies from this panel in order to beat the pros, right? Because that's what they're doing too. So there's an old saying, if you ain't cheating, you ain't trying, right? Now, cheating is not actually acceptable because in a proper game, right, that is well-designed with well-enforced rules, someone who cheats will lose. If cheating will cause you to lose, do not do it. But in a lot of games, cheating actually doesn't cause you to lose. For example, the New England Patriots supposedly probably cheated quite a few times and the penalty for doing so was not losing. The penalty was lose a draft pick, lose some money, right? That's not cheating. That's paid a win. That's, oh, I give a draft pick and I give some money and now I'm allowed to break the rules and give myself a competitive advantage, right? Lance Armstrong, that's cheating and losing. How many Tour de France did Lance Armstrong win? Zero. He won nothing ever. He's won the same number as me, right? Because the penalty for cheating was losing. If the penalty for cheating is not losing, cheat. Now, at this point, you might notice perhaps we've gone too far. I suggest that you step back from that ledge, my friends. The moral of this whole panel is very simple. Win games. Do the things we said and you will win games. But games are games. Games are not real life. If you cannot distinguish between a game and real life and you do real life unethical, evil, bad, dangerous things to win games, you're just doing unethical, evil, bad things in the real world. So do the things that will win in the context of the game. Do not do the things that will win that will hurt real people in the real world. Otherwise, you're just being a dick.