Sunday surprise — Xanatos and other Gambits, &c
[ by Charles Cameron — (some of) what gaming, TV watching & quotation mining can get you in terms of strategy ]
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First off, let me thank Trent Telenko for turning me onto the Xanatos Gambit at at ChicagoBoyx, which started me on this particular chose of a gaggle of wild geese..
The Xanatos Gambit caught my eye by virtue of its decision flow chart [you start at the top]:
That’s brilliant — not a win-win play, but an i-win-anyway ploy. [Linguists — remind me whether ploy is a warped variant of play, will you?] And Trent then identifies the Xanatos Gambit as Donald Trump’s characteristic play.. ploy.
Here’s an explanatory para::
A Xanatos Gambit is a plan for which all foreseeable outcomes benefit the creator — including ones that superficially appear to be failure. The creator predicts potential attempts to thwart the plan, and arranges the situation such that the creator will ultimately benefit even if their adversary “succeeds” in “stopping” them. When faced with a Xanatos Gambit the options are either to accept that the creator will get the upper hand and choose the outcome that is least beneficial to them, or to defeat them by finding a course that they didn’t predict.
A Xanatos Gambit is a Plan whose multiple foreseen outcomes all benefit its creator. It’s a win-win situation for whoever plots it.
Here’s a quote from a source unknown to me: Cavilo, The Vor Game:
The key to strategy… is not to choose a path to victory, but to choose so that all paths lead to a victory.
In the casino business they say that the house always wins, and indeed, it’s true. When gamblers lose all their money, the house gets rich, but when someone has a lucky streak and wins big, this only serves to encourage others to take more risks, which means the house will actually get even richer in the long run for having “lost” some money to a big winner. The law of large numbers is on their side, after all. This is, in short, how casinos can stay in business—they virtually always turn a profit on the actual gambling
Okay, here the geese gaggle in formation after the Gambit. Our clue:
Xanatos Speed Chess trumps Xanatos Gambits.
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Cosmo Lavish, a Terry Pratchett banker character from Discworld, saith:
Plans can break down. You cannot plan the future. Only presumptuous fools plan. The wise man steers.
I agree wholeheartedly with “You cannot plan the future” — a point I’ve made in my Art of Future Warfare entries
And since we’re in Chess territory:
What? That I used two fourteen-year-old pawns to turn a knight and topple a king? It’s chess, Daniel. Of course you don’t understand.
Tend to be played by The Chessmaster, logically enough.
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Well, I could go on, but let me just list some of the pages I came across, and invite you to look where your interests take you..
A convoluted Plan that relies on events completely within the realm of chance yet comes off without a hitch.
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