
Playing to Lose (2014) - luu
https://www.jefftk.com/p/playing-to-lose
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mixermf
In the game "First Loser Wins" you win points by coming in second place in
competitions, and then you win the game overall by having the second-most
amount of points. [http://firstloserwins.com](http://firstloserwins.com)

It's difficult to develop a winning strategy.

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dkarl
There are a couple of other important changes in basketball:

1\. The three-second rule is no longer a significant factor.

2\. The offense can only possess the ball for ten seconds on the side of the
court they're trying to score on. After that, they either lose the ball, or
they have to retreat across half-court and shoot from there.

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derefr
> When you have your stronger players stay on the bench but still keep going
> for goals you're balancing your desire to lose against your need to look to
> the judges like you're still trying to win.

This reminds me of historical approaches to war-fighting, where both you and
your opponent nation-state would build e.g. five classes of ships, biggest to
smallest; and then bring them all with you to a battle; and then your big
ships would fight their big ships, while your medium ships fought their medium
ships, and the smalls fought the smalls.

It always seemed to me that, in such situations, choosing to send those medium
and small ships off to fight one-another was, in some way, "playing to
lose"—or at least not "playing to win."

It goes against the more recent war-fighting learning: force concentration. If
you've got medium and small units, well, you can have them _also_ shoot at
whatever the big units are shooting at, and maybe it'll get dead sooner such
that they can all move onto shooting at something else!

I hope the analogy to business strategies is obvious :)

~~~
canal
> and then your big ships would fight their big ships, while your medium ships
> fought their medium ships, and the smalls fought the smalls.

big ships, medium ships, small ships ≤ big ships, big ships, big ships

Thus (assuming big ships are more advantageous) show up to the battlefield
with all big ships.

~~~
derefr
If you have infinite resources, sure, just make infinite big ships.

You make medium and small ships because they’re more cost-efficient: they can
turn the same number of dollars into more mobile gun/missile barrels (usually
at the cost of armour—the little ships are like DPS “glass cannons.”) But
whereas a DPS player in an MMO game gets protected by a “tank” player while
they do as much concentrated damage as possible, conventional historical
military doctrine actually had the small ships act as a “screen” for the big
ships—effectively having the DPS “tanking” for the “tank”!

Luckily, we’ve worked out how crazy this was in the last 80 years, and modern
doctrine for combined use of air and sea materiel actually concentrates fire
and has the most durable units protecting the strike units (basically by
having the sea units protect the air units from below, recapitulating the
millennia-old role of mobile artillery in protection of—and area denial
for—infantry.)

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aj7
This is a non sequitur. One can lose by not appearing, by violating rules, by
exposing yourself to the spectators, etc. Because the solution space for “win-
losing” is infinite, there is no game, hence no winning or losing.

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benjaminl
> But what if we relax the second requirement to only apply to intentional
> resignations, forfeitures, and fouls? What if we had a game where both sides
> were trying their absolute hardest to make the other side win?

The article address that. You still have to follow the rules of the game.

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vinchuco
No, you see, the article author is playing a supergame which is won by finding
a play-to-lose version of a game. The parent commenter is simply playing the
play-to-lose version of that supergame.

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vinchuco
Here is a tic-tac-toe version [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tic-tac-
toe_variants](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tic-tac-toe_variants)

And a chess version
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Losing_Chess](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Losing_Chess)

A large (finite?) list of chess variants also exists
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chess_variants](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chess_variants)

To be expected but nonetheless amazing how changing one bit in the game rules
can have strong effects in gameplay and strategy.

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wheresvic1
This is odd - so we just switched the definitions of winning an losing by
switching the rules around.

We could just play RevSoccer where the other team needs to stop you from
scoring own goals. You're technically still playing to succeed (i.e. win).

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js2
I’m sorry to tell you all that I just lost the game, and now you have too.

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kyberias
I was really confused when reading about the text under title "Football". Then
I noticed the title "Soccer". I guess I'll never learn.

~~~
perl4ever
Apparently "sakkā (サッカー), derived from "soccer", is much more commonly used
than futtobōru (フットボール)" in Japan[1].

The term "soccer" also seems to be used in South Africa, although not
exclusively[2].

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_in_Japan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_in_Japan)
[2][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premier_Soccer_League](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premier_Soccer_League)

