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Arimaa >> General Discussion >> Collection of selected commented games  
(Message started by: mouse on Jan 18th, 2005, 6:16am)

Title: Collection of selected commented games  
Post by mouse on Jan 18th, 2005, 6:16am
Today there is a selection of puzzles and general introduction to Arimaa which is very good for new players. But there's not anything specific to improve the play of the intermediate and high level players. Of course there is the comment that can be placed on the games. But these comments tend to be rather short and not really explaining the reason for different moves.

One of the things that has resulted in chess being played at the level its played today is the tradition with colleting commented games between high level players.

I would suggest to create a page with selected commented games with more thorough comments to the reason for different moves. I think there could be several categories, but some main categories could be:

•      comebacks, where there can be shown examples on games where a player overcome some initial setup back/blunder
•      how to carry out a horse + elephant attack and how to defend against it
•      how to keep a camel hostage and how to play if your camel is hostage

Title: Re: Collection of selected commented games  
Post by 99of9 on Jan 18th, 2005, 9:23am
I agree it's not quite at the level of detailed game commentary, but you should definitely take a look at all the work Fritzlein has been doing on Wikipedia under Arimaa Strategy.  Some great insight.  His mind is structured differently from mine, so reading it definitely taught me some useful things.

Title: Re: Collection of selected commented games  
Post by Fritzlein on Jan 18th, 2005, 10:43am
Another great resource is to play 99of9 and ask him after the game how he beat you.  He's always happy to explain, and I always learn something.

As to the commented games, it would be great if eventually there would be a way to replay games on the server with comments popping up on the appropriate moves, and a way to continue to edit and improve the commentary.  I'm not sure how high this would be on my priority list, though.  I'm more eager for variable time controls (e.g. having bots on-line that I can challenge at any time control I like) and an improved rating system.  But since it will be Omar doing any of this, feel free to lobby him to adopt your priorities.  :-)

Title: Re: Collection of selected commented games  
Post by mouse on Jan 18th, 2005, 12:21pm
I was not actually thinking about something that sophisticated in the beginning. I just thought about a page with links to the selected games and a comment that could be opened for the same game. Basically similar to a newspaper commentary on chess.

Title: Re: Collection of selected commented games  
Post by omar on Jan 22nd, 2005, 11:52am
This is really a great suggestion. I think it can be done without requiring too much extra effort.

I see it being done along the lines of how we did the 'Bot Bashers' page. I can create a page for such games and we can catagorize them on that page. The game link would open up the game comments window. Then it is up to the top players to add good commentary for the game and clearly mentioning what position the comments apply to. From the game comments window we can open the flash client to replay the game and step through it while following the comments. This is not as nice as having the comments pop-up automatically, but it does beat trying to follow games in a book or newspaper and it also has it's benifits such as allowing multiple people to add comments and even carry on a discussion about the game.

I will also eventually add a "Comments" button to the flash client (Karl had suggested this a while back) which opens the game comments page.

So feel free to use this area to nominate any games that should be added to the "Commented Games" page.



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