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BGonline.org Forums
Why so much debate over Opening Rolls?
Posted By: Timothy Chow In Response To: Why so much debate over Opening Rolls? (Phil Simborg)
Date: Monday, 14 September 2009, at 5:14 p.m.
Your logic would be sound if my playing Play A instead of Play B in real life would really earn me 0.010 more points per game where that decision came up. But it's far from clear that this is the case. First of all it's not clear that the bots are good enough to be able to estimate true equities of opening positions at this level of precision. I've mentioned this before---if you study other board games, you'll see that there is a huge gap between "much better than the best humans" and "perfect." I mean, Snowie and GNUBG can't even agree on the right play of 21$ 21, so why should we believe that their equity estimates are correct to 1 part in 1000? The problem is exacerbated because current rollout algorithms aren't self-correcting in the sense that I explained in a recent post here. Secondly, even if the bots were perfect, a 0.010 equity difference for bot-versus-bot doesn't necessarily translate into a 0.010 equity difference for me-versus-my-opponents.
This is not to say that it's pointless to study opening moves and responses. The effort put in to understanding the different ideas behind different moves will certainly pay off. It is also useful to know what the current theory is because it gives you a psychological advantage: it can make you more confident, and it can help you recognize whether your opponent is familiar with current theory. (And if your opponent does appear to be familiar with current theory then you may be able to exploit this fact by deliberately playing a non-theoretical move in order to lure them into thinking that you're weaker than you really are.)
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