Games of my youth

the peculiar playing habits of an only child

Tyler Cowen writes,

I also find that games and gaming are some of my most vivid and enduring memories from childhood. A lot of the rest has escaped into the fog. Today, however, I don’t play games at all.

I have some similar memories and some differences. I was an only child, so I had a lot of time to analyze games of strategy and fewer opportunities to actually play them. Fairly typical was a game called Summit (referring to diplomacy, not a mountain), which my parents gave me in 6th grade. I really liked the pieces and the instructions, but neither my parents nor anyone else ever learned how to play the game.

As an only child, I played a lot of games of solitaire. I remember clock solitaire as one of my favorites when I was age 9.

I learned bridge when I was very young, probably around age 8 or 9. I played mostly with my parents and a woman who we called my Aunt but who was a more distant relative. We went to an instructional bridge weekend at a resort in the Lake of the Ozarks when I was around 10 or so. That may have been my first experience playing duplicate (tournament) bridge. Even after that weekend, we knew close to nothing about the finer points of the game.

I learned chess at age 8 or so, and I recall when my neighbor Gary, whose talent was as an athlete and not as a student, beat me using what I recall referring to as Fool’s Mate.

I made an attempt to study chess openings around 9th grade, but I do not think that I have real aptitude for the game. When I play with my 8-year-old grandson, he sometimes beats me when I am not even trying to lose.

In around 8th grade, I had Stratego, and I thought hard about how best to set up my pieces. But I actually played the game fewer than five times. Around the same time I probably played the Avalon Hill game Gettysburg a handful of times. Then I ordered the games Jutland and 1914, and I studied them carefully without ever finding anyone with whom to play them.

I played poker with friends in 7th and 8th grade. After that, I realized that I did not like poker very much. I felt badly when I lost, and I felt sorry for my friends when I won.

My favorite game in 8th through 10th grade was Strat-O-Matic baseball. With the cards for the 1965 National League, I played almost an entire season by myself, using the schedule for that year. I listened to pop music on a transistor radio while I rolled dice and picked “Split” cards. I typed up a sheet for keeping score, and my mother used a copy machine to make 500 copies. I used most of them.

I also got the 1965 American League set, and the 1966 and 1967 National League sets. But I don’t think I played any games. I just studied the cards and made up line-ups. I figured out dice probabilities, and I used that to raise the value of players who walked a lot. This was decades before “on base percentage” became a thing.

Strat-O-Matic came out with a football version in high school, and I got some teams from 1967 and 1968. To play by myself, I created tables of offensive and defensive plays relative to down and yardage needed, and rolled dice to select them. So sometimes a pass play would encounter double coverage, and other times a zone would be left unguarded because of a blitz. I also ordered the cards for the 1969 Vikings and Chiefs, because the latter was my favorite team and they were the champions that year. The 1969 Chiefs are still my favorite football team—I lost interest in football not long afterward.

In high school, there were enough friends who played bridge so that my junior and senior year I played quite often. I have fond memories of playing late at night with Jerry and Tim at the lovely Amy’s house, snacking on Hostess Ding Dongs. She even sent me a care package of Ding Dongs when I was away for the summer after junior year.

In high school my friends and I also played a lot of Hearts. Our senior year, and the summer after, we also played a version of a television game “Call My Bluff,” which most people know as “Dictionary.” Our battles became really intense.

I studied bridge more in college, and a new bidding system called Precision got my attention. I showed it to one of my high school friends. Many years later, he and his wife took up euchre , a game which Tyler mentions. Until they showed it to me, I had no idea what it was. I don’t play.

Two of my college bridge partners went on to have successful bridge careers. They had opposite styles. Jeff was intuitive, and he went from novice to professional in less than a year. He liked to “operate,” throwing the opponents off by making misleading bids. For a while he made a living as a commodities trader, which seems like a natural place for his style of play.

The other partner was straight and systematic, making learn a very complex bidding system. He in turn had a partner who later became famous, winning some major championships. I gave up bridge in graduate school and took up folk dancing instead. I was never at good at bridge as I thought I should have been, but I loved to try to make up my own bidding systems. I still made up one about five years ago.

I got married at age 26, and later that year I came upon Othello. I played several games against myself, trying to figure out the strategy. The following year, there was an article in the Washington Post about some tournament Othello players, including a young whiz, Brian Rose. I got in touch with the U.S. Othello Association, and with the first issue of Othello Quarterly that I received I realized that my ideas about strategy were all wrong. I studied the magazine, practiced on my own, and started going to tournaments.

I eventually became one of the top 4 U.S. players. I generally got an advantage in the opening, due to my practice and study, but then lost to better players later on, because I was not as good at visualizing positions several moves ahead.

My peak year was 1987. I finished fourth in the U.S. nationals. We sent three players to the world championship in Milan. One of the top 3 could not go, so I got to play, along with Brian Rose and another young star, David Shaman. The tournament rules precluded playing against someone else from your country. That was fortunate for me, since Brian and David finished in the top 4. I ended up in 6th place, and our team won the team title. I would have finished several places lower if I had been obliged to play Brian or David. They both went on to win multiple world championships, although more typically the world championship was dominated by Japanese players.

I wrote many articles for Othello Quarterly. I had one series, called “Othello, People, and Computers.” By 1990 I was ready to give up playing in tournaments, because I could see that computers would be better than humans. I was confident that the same thing was going to happen in chess—it was just a matter of how many iterations of Moore’s Law it would take.

These days, I sometimes play Othello against a computer, just to relax. I lose, and then I play back the game and ask the computer for hints at certain points. When I see a promising hint, I try it and go forward again. Eventually, I “win.”

In the late 1980s, I took up Rotisserie Baseball, now more commonly called Fantasy Baseball. Friends, mostly from Freddie Mac, auctioned off the American League. I thought I did well in the auction, but my team almost always finished in the middle of the pack. Today, I think I understand better what I was doing wrong. I still like to play, but the Freddie Mac league has long since broken up, so I play on line against people I don’t know.

Even though there is a ton of luck involved in fantasy baseball, there is also are a lot of strategic considerations. Every year I write a Substack post on some aspect of fantasy baseball strategy.

I also play games with my grandchildren. I am happy to see that they and their parents enjoy games. I note that among young Sabbath-observant Jewish couples, board games are a very popular activity on Saturday afternoons. Let the games continue!