Elliott C. Evans writes: >Sure; OK; if everybody in the tournament agrees that none of them >wants to actually win the tournament, this would work. I don't see >it as highly likely, though. It's in the microcosm that this kind of metagaming actually makes a difference, I think. In my fourth game of the Ice-offs, I had 2 wins, and was pretty sure that double-winners were thin on the ground. In the game was another double-winner, a single winner, and Josh Drobina (who had no wins) So...what was, metagame, important, was that the single-winner not win. As long as he didn't, there was a good chance that I'd make the finals; if he did, I had to compete on score. What actually happened was that I played my best game, and got timed out during the attempt to rescue my iced defenders that I got from a late deal with Josh D, leaving JD in posession of the field. But a valid metagame (but to me, not a very fun actual-game) strategy would have been to attack the single-winner mercillessly, not worrying about anything aside from staying out of the icehouse and not letting him (? I think so) win, on the grounds that short of winning myself, that was the best way of making sure I'd make the finals. -- Joshua Kronengold (mneme@(io.com, labcats.org)) |\ _,,,--,,_ ,) --^-- "Did you know, if you increment enough, you /,`.-'`' -, ;-;;' /\\ get an extra digit?" "I knew," weeps Six. |,4- ) )-,_ ) /\ /-\\\ "We knew. But we had forgotten." '---''(_/--' (_/-'