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OLM Th 04/22/10 Start of Match #2

Posted By: Timothy Chow
Date: Friday, 23 April 2010, at 8:33 p.m.

In Response To: OLM Th 04/22/10 Start of Match #2 (neilkaz)

Possibly we're getting hung up over the word "importance." When I practice against a bot, I often deliberately play moves that I know are not what theory deems best, in order to improve my own mastery of the game.

I noticed that Gus Hansen played 13/8 6/4 in one of his games against Bob Koca in the match that was discussed here recently (as the opening move, not as a response to 24/13, but that doesn't matter for what I'm saying here). Stick has mentioned that he will sometimes do the same, especially against players that he knows are much weaker than he is. Even supposing that I'm not going to adopt 13/8 6/4 as part of my opening repertoire, I should know something about the positions that result, simply because someone else might play it against me. What is the game plan for each side? What is likely to happen? What kinds of tricky decisions are likely to arise? If I don't play some games that start this way, then I am not going to learn the answers to these questions, and I will be a sitting duck for the stronger player who tries to complicate the game to confuse me. In the Hansen/Koca game, Bob then rolled a 6-2. How was he supposed to play it? Running? Counter-slotting? Someone who's just memorized opening rollouts isn't necessarily going to have a clue what the answer is.

In the context of the current OLM, XGR+ is certainly not going to play something like 13/8 6/4, so if we want to use the game to learn something about that variation, then we'll have to play it ourselves. Now if it were so horrendously bad that no strong player would play it even as a gambit, then it would not be that valuable to study it. But I don't think that's the case.

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