For our third lesson in how-to-play-Games-Workshop-games, I decided to zoom out a little. Start from the very, very beginning. We had a little lesson on playing poker.
Why poker, when I was trying to teach Amanda about Games Workshop games? Well, here is (in my words) what happened the last time we played Dreadfleet: everything was going fine, Amanda was winning, until . . . she draw a single, unlucky card. And then she was not winning anymore.
And then she totally checked out, refused to roll dice, tried to take a nap, and was generally in a bad mood.
Now, one thing I frequently talk to Amanda about, relating to the differences in our childhood, is the fact that I played team sports and Amanda did not. When I say I played team sports, I mean I really played team sports. (I am not exaggerating when I say: I am one of the ten most competitive people I know). BUT, I played team sports.
And, as everyone who ever plays team sports knows, sometimes you play really well . . . and your team loses. Sometimes you play really badly, and your team wins. Winning or losing is one thing (contingent on other players on your team) and how you play is another.
A person like me, for example, might play a game of soccer, and my team might have won, but I still might have been angry at myself for playing badly. Or visa versa: I play a game of pickup basketball, play AWESOMELY , but still, it’s pickup basketball (who knows who’s going to be on your team?) and my team loses. I would be very happy if you met me after that game, despite losing.
Basically (going back to that game of Dreadfleet), it seemed like Amanda lacked this separation, between winning or losing on the one hand, and your individual performance on the other. She drew a card, and she translated it to herself (emotionally) as: “I did something wrong, I sucked, I am a bad person, etc.”
Poker, or games based on probability (like all Games Workshop games, which are based on dice or cards) have a slightly different separation than team sports. In poker, you might do everything right, and still lose—not because your teammate did something wrong, but because . . . .you were unlucky!
It’s that simple. With poker, you play hand after hand after hand. It’s a game of iterations. All you can do is “play the odds”—and that’s what a good poker player is (emotionally) focused on: getting the odds right, making the right play. If the cards fall the way he wants, then great. If not, that’s part of the game. You’re going to play hundreds more hands. And you did all you can do.
Now Amanda, a person who has played many card games in her life, didn’t—I don’t think—have any idea just how much calculation of odds a really good poker player does, in his head, all the time. We went through some hands, and calculated some odds: Say you have two high cards in your hand after the flop (this is hold’em). What are the odds that you will get a pair? And then, based on that probability, what should your next move be?
Basically, I wanted to open up another zone, a world of strategy and odds, that you can then interact with emotionally. That is different than just being emotionally invested in what card happens to fall.
And I said at the end is that if you make a bad move in poker (i.e., you don’t “play the odds” right) but you still win—just from luck—what a veteran poker play would do is, not praise you, but come up to you and say, “You are a f—ing idiot. If you play that way again, you are going to lose. Don’t ever do that again.”
. . . and finally . . . going back to Amanda, and that last game of Dreadfleet, Amanda did everything right as a strategist. She “played the odds” right. But she was unlucky. She drew a card (and the odds of drawing that card seem to be about 1/50) and she lost.
There wasn’t anything she should have done differently. She should have been proud of getting to that point. A veteran player, I think, would have came up to her, after losing that way, and just said, “Good job,” shrugged, and then asked rhetorically, “What are you going to do?”
What are you going to do?
Play again, probably. If you are at all a competitive person.
Difficult Things 