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I cannot find these plays at all.

Posted By: Timothy Chow
Date: Wednesday, 30 September 2009, at 2:19 a.m.

In Response To: I cannot find these plays at all. (Jason Lee)

Due to the nature of your question, perhaps for once my non-expert perspective will be as useful as (or even more useful than?) the perspectives of the experts.

I did see 10/8 10/7 quickly, although I probably would not have considered 10/7 13/11 over the board.

A bad shortcoming I used to have, and still have to some extent although I've mostly trained myself out of it, is to spot an "automatic" play, see no obvious alternative, and make it immediately without further thought. The "lateral thinking" expert Edward de Bono argues that this kind of psychology lies behind a lot of missed ideas: it's not that we looked and couldn't find, but we didn't look at all because we saw something we liked and didn't look further. The good is the enemy of the best. Half the battle is training oneself out of this bad habit. (It doesn't help that backgammon culture glamorizes rapid play, unlike chess culture or go culture for example.)

Assuming you've learned that lesson, and are looking beyond the "obvious" 13/8, what prevents one from seeing this kind of play? I'm sure that a big factor is a visceral fear of leaving blots. It's similar to the visceral fear in chess of losing material. One grandmaster, famed for his attacking play, said that he always started thinking by looking for how to sacrifice material---the exact opposite of how most people think. Similarly, as a training exercise, I think it's useful to approach a position by asking, "How can I leave the most blots?" This will help loosen one's mindset. In a real game, of course, it would be a waste of time to deliberately look for blot-making plays on every move. However, whenever I strongly outboard my opponent, or when my opponent is on the bar, I remind myself that leaving blots will be more attractive than usual, and I look harder for plays that leave blots. Those plays will often be wrong, but the advantage is that they're now on my radar screen and should be picked up when they happen to be right.

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