How to Win Games and Beat People (Rebroadcast)

Games are as old as civilization itself, and some people think they have huge social value regardless of whether you win or lose. Tom Whipple is not one of those people. That’s why he consulted an army of preposterously overqualified experts to find the secret to winning any game.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 0:46Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:30Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hey there. It's Stephen Dubner. There's a pretty good chance that you or someone you love has recently received or given some sort of game as a holiday gift. If so, there is probably an even better chance that the playing of said game will ultimately lead to competitive urges that had been capably subdued to that point. It will perhaps even lead to tears. No one likes to lose. Wouldn't you like to avoid the tears of defeat? The following episode will help you do that. It's called "How to Win Games and Beat People." It was part of our Self-improvement Month series from 2016. We've updated it slightly. If you want to hear the rest of the series, our podcast archive is at stitcher or Freakonomics.com.

• 3:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  Thanks for listening and good luck.

• 3:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's an activity that seems to be eternal and universal.

• 3:18Speaker 01

  We do know that board games are just about as old as civilization itself and human beings.

• 3:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's an activity that is inherently communal.

• 3:27Speaker 02

  They're here four nights a week playing this card game that's been around since I was a kid.

• 3:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  And it's an activity in which the mere participation brings joy, regardless of outcome, right? Losers look for joy. I look for victory. Ah, victory. Well, if that's how you feel, then this is the episode for you. "How to Win Games and Beat People." Because winning feels like this.

• 4:00Speaker 03

  Hot damn! Woo-hoo! Yeah!

• 4:16Speaker 04

  From Stitcher and Dubner Productions, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 4:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  I love to play games. There, I said it.

• 4:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  For a long time, I was afraid to admit how much I like playing games because it seems a bit childish. And as adults, we are encouraged to do away with childish things. But you know what? I've changed my mind because playing games means that you're taking part in the glorious progression in civilization. My favorite game, for instance, is Backgammon.

• 4:59Speaker 01

  So Backgammon is a great example of a game that has ancient roots, in this case, Greek.

• 5:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  And that is?

• 5:05Speaker 01

  Mary Pilon, the author of The Monopolists, a book about the secret history of the board game Monopoly.

• 5:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  Pilon knows the history of other games as well.

• 5:13Speaker 01

  OK, so Senet goes back to Egypt, around 3,500 B.C. Go and Luobo, which are Chinese games, also go back to the earliest known civilization. Erp, that goes back to Mesopotamia. Parcheesi goes back to India. Dice, Mesopotamian. Backgammon, Byzantine Greece. Checkers, ancient Egypt. And then, of course, Monopoly, 1904. And a whole bunch of other stuff in between.

• 5:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  Game playing boomed in America. Much of the boom emanated from Massachusetts, which was home to both the Parker Brothers and Milton Bradley Companies. Boston had a lot to do with it.

• 5:50Speaker 01

  It was a major port. It was a major shipping hub. So a lot of these games that had ancient roots were coming through via the sailors and folks on ships.

• 5:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  In the US, ancient games were modernized, new ones were invented, and history itself conspired to create demand.

• 6:07Speaker 01

  So first of all, you have electric lighting. Now you could play games at night.

• 6:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  Also, child labor was going out of fashion.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  We start seeing laws that allow for children to go to school. Just across the board, you have a rise in leisure time. Board games become part of a lifestyle that previous generations wouldn't have even conceived of.

• 6:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  Fast forward now, a few more generations.

• 6:28Speaker 05

  Newer games allow more-- there's more creativity, there's more strategy. Like, the classic games are fun, but it's like Monopoly or like Chutes and Ladders. Eventually, you're just rolling a dice, something happens, and that's it.

• 6:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Martin Walker. Walker is a grad student in Knoxville, Tennessee. Today, he's visiting New York, and he's at a board game café in Greenwich Village called The Uncommons. With his wife, Jenny Chin, and a friend, they are playing a game called--

• 6:53Speaker 06

  Takano Ko.

• 6:56Speaker 05

  Takano Ko. It is a map-building, bamboo-growing, panda-eating board game.

• 7:02Speaker 07

  Jenny, I will slay you. I just started this game, and I will slay you. Let's see about that.

• 7:08Speaker 06

  We'll try it out, we'll see.

• 7:09Speaker 05

  We're gonna find out this one.

• 7:10Speaker 07

  Is that a competition, and it's not really a group work thing? We're just--

• 7:15Speaker 05

  We're each helping to grow a farm, but we're also taking advantage of what they've built and taking it from them.

• 7:20Speaker 06

  It's kind of similar to Settlers of Catan. Yeah, you're building the same map, but you have your own agenda. Yeah.

• 7:28Speaker 07

  That's horrible.

• 7:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  Greg May is the founder of The Uncommons.

• 7:34Speaker 02

  I've always loved board games, and I've always felt like there needed to be a place, a sort of home for games in New York City.

• 7:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  So that's what he started, with a collection of nearly 1,000 board games.

• 7:48Speaker 02

  Camel Up to Abyss, Netrunner to Five Tribes, classics like Operation and Mousetrap, Heroes of Normandy, or Merchants of Venus, almost a dozen different versions of Dominion, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Walking Dead. We have games for quilters, like Quilt Show, trivia games like Wits and Wagers, games like Pandemic. There's been this explosion in growth in games that weren't around when I was a kid.

• 8:12Speaker 08

  I've designed Bad Medicine, which is a party game where the players are all pharmaceutical companies making horrible drugs.

• 8:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Gil Hova. He is a board game designer and publisher who lives in Jersey City.

• 8:23Speaker 08

  I usually drop by here just to see how things are going, what people are playing, what's been selling, that sort of thing. I have a game coming out later this year called The Networks, where the players are all running television networks, starting with three horrible public access shows, and slowly improving their network over five seasons. The business has been incredible. I'm almost sold out of Bad Medicine at this point, out of my entire print run, and I raised over $100,000 on Kickstarter for The Networks.

• 8:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  That is a true fact. And Hova is not the only game designer crowdfunding his work. Kickstarter has an entire division dedicated to games. Since 2009, nearly $1 billion has been pledged to games. A lot of these are video games, not old fashioned board games. And before you get too excited about some board game renaissance, consider the sales numbers on board games versus video games. Board game and puzzle sales in the United States bring in about $2 billion a year. Video game sales total $36 billion a year. So for every dollar we spend on board games and puzzles, we spend roughly $18 on video games. In any case, the instinct to play some kind of a game with some kind of opponent is extraordinarily

• 9:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  common and long-lived.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  Just about every civilization with dates that go way, way, way, way, way back, they were playing games.

• 9:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  Mary Pallanigan.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  Some of them were race games, so that's kind of what you think of a path with little markers that you'd move, you know, trying to get ahead of an opponent. Some of them were more strategy based. Some mimic the world that was around them and have warfare as a theme, or religion is a huge recurring theme in early games. And often, games were used by religious leaders as a way of fortune telling, but also winners of games often had kind of a spiritual aura about them because they were able to win something that combined luck and skill.

• 10:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  Pallan herself is a gamer.

• 10:20Speaker 01

  So my family has taken to playing Settlers of Catan at holidays. And it's an extremely popular game. It came out of Germany, like a lot of really fantastic games do. There's many things I love about it, but it turns us into animals. It brings out the best and worst of us, including particularly the adults. At least at one Thanksgiving, there had to be a handwritten apology note, there are accusations of theft. It really gets extreme, but it's a great way for everybody to get together.

• 10:50Speaker 09

  Some people, I've heard some families, they get together at family gatherings and they think, this will be pleasant, we'll play a few games and we'll have a lovely evening. And I find it extraordinary.

• 11:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, I'd like you to meet Tom Whipple. We'll get to his CV shortly.

• 11:08Speaker 09

  I have an early memory from when I was nine or 10 and we were gathered with the extended family and we were playing a game. I can't even remember the game, but what I do remember is that my Uncle Terry, when he beat me, this nine-year-old who had seen grow up and played with his kids, he stood up, he jumped on the sofa and he pointed at me and with each point and each bounce of him on the sofa, he says, "I win, you lose. I win, you lose." And that sort of, that taught me that, you know, the, I suppose, the morality of game playing that I've taken with me. It's about I win and you lose. So I suppose this book was an attempt to codify that in such a way that I can eventually beat Terry.

• 11:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  Whipple has written a book titled How to Win Games and Beat People. In his day job, he is the science editor for The Times in London.

• 12:00Speaker 09

  I mean, editor is a very grandiose title. There are two of us who cover science for The Times and we try to read the major journals, Nature, Cell, Science, and see what the interesting and important science stories of the day are. And then we try to make them accessible in 600 or fewer words for the public.

• 12:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  And are you, or have you ever been a scientist yourself?

• 12:23Speaker 09

  I am a mathematician by training. I studied for a maths degree and then I left, possibly because I discovered I wasn't as good at calculus as I was at writing about things. But I try not to let scientists know that I'm a mathematician because then they don't talk to me like I'm an idiot.

• 12:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  And you want them to talk to you like you're an idiot?

• 12:42Speaker 09

  I want them to talk to me like an idiot, particularly if I'm at CERN or somewhere like that.

• 12:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  As we mentioned, the title of Whipple's book is How to Win Games and Beat People. Nothing particularly bloodthirsty about that, but the subtitle, Defeat and Demolish Your Friends and Family.

• 13:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  I was hoping, this is going to sound terrible, I gather if you still want to beat Terry, that he's alive. I was hoping he met a grisly death after doing that to you.

• 13:14Speaker 09

  Terry is alive, and he is aware that I'm on my way to take the advice in this book and try to get my own back, because it's been a long time coming.

• 13:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  Today, how to win any game, if not with grace necessarily, with Tom Whipple as our guide and his book as our bible.

• 13:36Speaker 09

  Really, the premise for it, I suppose the elevator pitch was it's preposterously overqualified people advising on games. So I have a special forces soldier on pillow fighting, and I have a structural engineer on Jenga, and games theorists all over the place.

• 13:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  But let me ask you, I guess, an obviously paradoxical question about your mission here. Let's say if I'm the only one who reads the book, and I learn how to win every game, then I plainly have an advantage. But then if you read the book as well, then you have it, have that same advantage. And then the game theory puzzle becomes a very, very different one, doesn't it not?

• 14:11Speaker 09

  I mean, it's, yes. You've described sort of a meta-game theory problem. It's a game theory about a book about game theory. How many people read my book before it's a failure? I'll just say, like, I mean, I think both my agent and publisher would agree with this, I'm very happy to take that risk. If enough people are prepared to buy my book, I would consider that I've won a completely different game, which is the game to get a house in Kensington.

• 14:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  Let's take Jenga. First of all, describe why you went to a structural engineer to figure out the best way to win at the game.

• 14:42Speaker 09

  I spoke to a structural engineer who spent a lot of the time talking about how he likes to beat architects at Jenga, because his fundamental hypothesis was they can do all of their fancy drawings, but he can play Jenga. But actually, the most interesting person was a woman who invented it I spoke to. And she said that when she plays Jenga with people, she's often accused of cheating, because she likes to put her elbow against the tower when she's pulling out the blocks to stabilize it. And people say you can't do this. And she says, well, look, I invented the game. There's only three rules. You can only use one hand. You can only take out one block at the time. And if that block touches the floor, then it's over. And her other tactic was, I don't know if you've played with those annoying people who

• 15:26Speaker 09

  aren't trying to get this as high as possible. And instead of taking ones from the outside, the ones on either side, they take the one from the middle, which means that you, that row's then useless to you. You can't move anymore. What she'd do was she'd pinch the ones on the outside, the one on the left and the one on the right, and move them together. So that she can then take one of them out and get another piece of value out of that row. And again, she says, you know, people say I'm cheating.

• 15:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  For the beloved sport of stone skipping, also known as stone skimming, Whipple spoke with a guy called

• 15:58Speaker 09

  Kurt Steiner.

• 15:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  Who had a relatively simple goal in life.

• 16:01Speaker 09

  He said to his wife, I want to quit my job to become the world's best stone skimmer. And for five years he trained. But the interesting thing about this was, there's a lot of theory on this. It's a standard undergraduate physics problem. And I was going to go to one of these physics professors to find out from them what the optimal way of throwing a stone is. And they all agree on the angles and the velocities and the spins and all of this. And they get their undergraduates to work it out. And obviously, the problem with that, as I know well, having studied maths, is that their angles, velocities and spins are all based upon a perfectly spherical stone in a frictionless environment

• 16:43Speaker 09

  that does all of these things. And actually, what Kurt Steiner discovered was that none of it was true. And it's one of these wonderful things where you think science is so advanced that, you know, normal people can't do anything about it. But he's definitively proved all this science wrong because he got 88 stone skins.

• 17:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  And does that make him something like a world champion?

• 17:05Speaker 09

  I think it exceeded the previous one by more than 20. I mean, essentially, he stopped counting. The YouTube clip is up, and I'd urge everyone to Google it, because this is his Sistine Chapel. I mean, he's given this gift to the world of this stone that just, it just floats along the lake. It's absolutely extraordinary. And the way he did it was, he aims, rather than the physics, which says you throw in at an angle, it comes out at that angle, he throws at about 30 degrees, and he throws so fast, he uses-

• 17:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  30 degrees down or up?

• 17:36Speaker 09

  30 degrees angle to the horizontal.

• 17:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  What would look like straight into the water?

• 17:40Speaker 09

  It would be pretty close to straight, but he throws it so fast. What he does is he moves his entire body. So he swivels his shoulder, and he's got colleagues in the profession who've had sporting injuries as a consequence of doing stone skipping, where he swivels his whole shoulder back and brings his arm, and it's almost like a whip, and then all of the movement goes into the very tip of his arm, and out goes the stone as fast and with as much spin as possible. And yeah, it goes almost, it looks like he's going almost directly down into the water, except by the time it hits the water, it's not going directly down, and then it comes out at about 5 degrees.

• 18:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so here's the thing. Most people listening to this probably are not going to take up stone skipping, only because it requires a lot of things, you know, the water, the stones, an arm, a fair bit of lunacy, and so on. But many, many, many people who listen to this do routinely play games with their friends, family, people they love, people they might not love so much. And I would like to propose that you and I, right now, on the radio, play a few of these games against each other, and see how it works out. Are you up for that, Tom?

• 18:53Speaker 09

  I'm absolutely up for that.

• 18:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  I asked you to prepare a little bit by bringing into the studio a couple of the games that I've brought into the studio. And I do want to make an admission to you, which is, as a professional, I have not acted professionally here, in that typically, I would read the book, or at least most of the book, of the person I'm interviewing. And in this case, I purposely did not read it, because I did not want to know your secrets yet. So let me apologize for not having read your book yet.

• 19:28Speaker 09

  That's fine. I mean, this slightly fills me with dread, because it makes it all more embarrassing when I lose.

• 19:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  Well, that was kind of my idea, Tom. I was thinking that if I could maybe beat you. So I thought we'd play four games. And I thought if I could beat you at one, where you have the optimal strategy for all four, that a 1 in 3 record might make me look a little bit like a hero.

• 19:49Speaker 09

  As game theorists call it, I think that would be our Nash equilibrium. Because if I can only lose on one, then I'll be very happy as well.

• 19:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  So how would you feel about one victory and one draw for me? Would that push us over into the hero category for me, or not quite?

• 20:04Speaker 09

  Well, if we're going to do games like rock, paper, scissors, then there's an element of chance that I can always blame. I can always say it's only going to be 60% in my favor.

• 20:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  Oh, already blaming with the chance. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 20:16Speaker 09

  I've got to get the excuses in early, yeah.

• 20:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  Coming up on Freakonomics Radio, I quickly accomplished my first goal: getting in Tom Whipple's head.

• 20:31Speaker 09

  You've got nothing to lose in this. It's me who's got the entire reputation and my publishing future.

• 20:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  But soon, he recaptures the psychological high ground.

• 20:39Speaker 09

  See, you began that by saying, because I'm your friend. So I think you're just trying to gain my trust so that you can lie.

• 20:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  And we have to work out some ground rules for rock, paper, scissors.

• 20:51Speaker 09

  It sounds like what baboons do with their bottoms, doesn't it?

• 21:13Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 21:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com/freak. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK, too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash freak. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Southern New Hampshire University. There's no hiding how convenient Southern New Hampshire University makes college. They offer over 80 career-focused graduate programs online. Classes have no set meeting times, so you can balance life and learning, and online tuition rates are some of the lowest in the country, making it all a little more manageable. A school this willing to work with you is worth the investment.

• 22:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  Visit s n h u dot edu slash Freakonomics to learn more. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by PNC Bank. Boring. Great word, bad rep. Yet, time and time again, here at Freakonomics, we find that when something culture-changing happens, boring things like calculations and careful planning are usually behind it, which begs the question, why not apply it to other aspects of life? Like banking, for example? Well, PNC Bank did since its inception, proving time and again that the best banking strategy Isn't the exciting type, but the steady, reliable, definitely not YOLO type. PNC Bank, brilliantly boring since 1865.

• 23:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  Brilliantly boring since 1865 is a registered mark of the PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. PNC Bank, National Association, Member FDIC. Tom Whipple, the author of How to Win Games and Beat People, has agreed to play four games with me. I have prepared by not reading his book. What you're about to hear is a substantially edited version of our battle because it took more than two hours to play. And I don't think even the most devoted Freakonomics Radio listener is interested in listening to two grown men play board games for two hours. Whipple was in a radio studio in London. I was in a studio in New York.

• 24:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  I thought that we could begin with Connect Four. Does that work with you?

• 24:12Speaker 09

  Yep.

• 24:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, I should also say that in anticipation of this game fest, we've brought a couple participants into the studio here to act as, well, might be referees because we want to make sure that, no offense to you, but I cheat a lot at everything, so.

• 24:27Speaker 09

  Well, the point of this game is, I think, that we shouldn't, or this book is, that we shouldn't really trust each other and we're all allowed to win. So, no, I understand.

• 24:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  Well said. Yeah, okay. So I've got here, Irva Gunja. Irva, can you just say hello?

• 24:38Speaker 10

  Hello.

• 24:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  And, Irva, is there anything you can say in a sentence or two that, you know, do you want to take a pledge of honesty as a moderator referee?

• 24:46Speaker 10

  I will take that pledge. I also brought with me my iPhone so I can record anything if we need it for the record. And I also have a very official referee's whistle here.

• 24:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  Let's hear it. Now, I just have to say, Tom, I didn't know about the camera, so my strategy needs to change very rapidly. No, okay. And Tom, do you have somebody there with you in London?

• 25:07Speaker 09

  Yeah, Molly will say hello.

• 25:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hi Molly. So, Tom, you apparently know how to win at this every time, presuming you go first, I understand, correct?

• 25:18Speaker 09

  Well, yeah. It is possible to win every time presuming you go first. That's been proven by computer. And I know a very good strategy for ensuring that so long as no one makes any stupid mistakes along the way, you always win if you go first, and probably if you go second. But it depends upon my ability and your ability not to make stupid mistakes along the way.

• 25:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  So I guess I should let you go first, then?

• 25:44Speaker 09

  You go first, and then I've got something more to play.

• 25:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, you want to play yellow or red?

• 25:49Speaker 09

  I'll play yellow.

• 25:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  Whipple and I each had a board in the studio with us, but because we couldn't see each other's board, we agreed to label the boards so we could replicate each other's moves. So, we labeled the x-axis with the numbers 1 through 7 from left to right, and the y-axis with the letters A through F from bottom to top. I'm going to take what I think is the obvious right move and drop it in the center, which is column 4, which goes all the way down to row A.

• 26:18Speaker 09

  I will go directly on top of you with my yellow.

• 26:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, so I have only two options, I think, sensible options, but maybe you've got me overthinking my Connect4 strategy.

• 26:30Speaker 09

  I think you may be overthinking. I mean, I'm very pleased that I phased you out already, but...

• 26:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  You've totally psyched me out. You're in my head. I will drop what I think is an obvious one, column 3, down all the way to the bottom to row A.

• 26:43Speaker 09

  So I'll put mine down in column 5.

• 26:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Well, then I would be an idiot. I think you'll tell me not to go for A2, but I'm considering B3. If I were playing with a child, I would definitely go for A2 because 3 in a row looks good, even though I know you'll block me. All right, so I'm gonna go for B3.

• 27:05Speaker 09

  Okay.

• 27:07Speaker 09

  Then, oh no! I don't think we're there yet.

• 27:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  Oh, but just the...

• 27:16Speaker 11

  I love the panic in your voice, just already.

• 27:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, just so you know, that was not fake panic. That was real panic.

• 27:21Speaker 09

  Well, you've got nothing to lose in this. It's me who's got the entire reputation and my publishing future.

• 27:27Speaker 11

  Not to instill you with more fear, but so-

• 27:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  Oh, great. Molly, come on.

• 27:31Speaker 11

  But what I found really interesting was that this was a tactic used by Beyoncé on Kanye West in Connect 4. And I, I mean, we're on the side of Beyoncé here, is all I know.

• 27:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'm Kanye, then?

• 27:43Speaker 11

  Ooh, yeah.

• 27:44Speaker 09

  Yeah, I think you're Kanye.

• 27:45Speaker 11

  Yeah, you're Kanye.

• 27:46Speaker 09

  Kanye is the best-

• 27:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Who won?

• 27:47Speaker 11

  Well, Beyoncé.

• 27:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  Did she go first?

• 27:49Speaker 09

  I think you've heard of the Fischer-Spasky chess match?

• 27:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  I have.

• 27:53Speaker 09

  This was the equivalent in Connect 4. It was, at least according to Showbiz Press, and I mean, if you can't believe the Showbiz Press, then where are we in the world? Kanye West, Jay-Z, and Beyoncé were backstage in 2009. And what do the three biggest names in world music do in the backstage? Well, they had a Connect 4 tournament. And Kanye West, who describes himself in his music as "God's vessel", lost 8-1 to Beyoncé.

• 28:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  Ooh, that's an argument for atheism right there.

• 28:23Speaker 09

  She is indeed my inspiration for this game.

• 28:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  So you're not channeling a mathematician, you're channeling Beyoncé, which is a much more formidable force.

• 28:33Speaker 09

  Exactly, yeah. I mean, you don't argue with Beyoncé, no.

• 28:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  Our Connect 4 match went on and on for the next 20 minutes. I'm gonna go for C.

• 28:44Speaker 09

  I am going to go to block off your potential three in a row on the bottom.

• 28:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  You know, I'll be honest with you. If I look at this as an amateur, which I am, it looks to me like Red's winning.

• 28:55Speaker 09

  That three in a row worries me quite a lot.

• 28:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  Question: Has the publisher already written you the check?

• 29:01Speaker 09

  The check has come and gone and been spent, so we're all right. We're all right.

• 29:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  Until we were down to an inevitable finish.

• 29:09Speaker 10

  All the slots have been filled except for column 2. It is now Whipple's turn, and he will be forced to play 2B.

• 29:18Speaker 09

  It's doom, isn't it?

• 29:19Speaker 11

  At least you're losing with humor.

• 29:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  And I really only have one move, and it happens to be a winning move.

• 29:26Speaker 09

  And are you going to claim the five in the row or the four in the row diagonally that gives you?

• 29:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  I am going to claim Connect 9.

• 29:32Speaker 10

  Game Dubner.

• 29:34Speaker 09

  Oh dear, it's not good for Blighty.

• 29:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  Tom, plainly I stumbled into a lucky progression there and happened to beat you.

• 29:44Speaker 09

  Well, that's very sweet for you to say I stumbled, but what I will say in my defence, in some senses, what we just had is the classic Connect 4 game. Sometimes you'll lose because someone will spot a cunning little fork or you won't spot that someone's got three in a row, but often you end up filling it up and then you are forced in the last column to make a play that you know is going to give your opponent victory. It's a German word, Zugzwang, have you come across this?

• 30:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  I haven't, I like it though.

• 30:12Speaker 09

  The Germans have a word for everything and it's not surprising that maybe in the Middle Europe, Central European politics, they had this word because it's a word that means being forced to do something that will guarantee your enemy victory.

• 30:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  Oh, I do Zugzwang every day, I have to say, I'm glad to know there's a word for it.

• 30:30Speaker 09

  Well, there you go, so that's Zugzwang. We mentioned the epic struggle between Kanye West and Beyoncé Knowles. What was also reported at the time was that the reason she won was because she had read the master's thesis of a guy called Victor Alis. Now, obviously, I could have interviewed Kanye West for my book, I could have interviewed Beyoncé Knowles, but why interview either of them when I can go to a Dutch computer scientist called Victor Alis? He had designed a programme that always played the optimal move in Connect 4 and it knew it had been proven mathematically to be perfect. There are four and a half trillion different combinations in Connect 4, but what he said

• 31:12Speaker 09

  to me is, he was a sort of relatively keen player and he says, "I bet you've lost games of Connect 4 where you feel that was just bad luck." And I suppose before I'd spoken to him, I could have put what happened to us down to bad luck as opposed to extremely bad play on my part, and he says, "It's not bad luck. It is not bad luck when you put that there, when you're forced into Zugzwang, because actually, if you go first..." You will be in the situation where you will find that final four in the row, you've got these three dangling, waiting to be filled. And you'll find that the final four in the row, it will be completed on an odd row. If you go second, it will be completed on an even row. And that's exactly what we found.

• 31:54Speaker 09

  If I had a three in a row, ready for completion on an even row by the end of that game, I would have won. But you had won on row number three, and you won. And that's why.

• 32:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, now, shall we disgorge our checkers? Because that's always been, to me, the most fun part of Connect Four.

• 32:08Speaker 09

  Yeah, yeah, here they go.

• 32:10Speaker 11

  I'm gonna have to bow out. I'm really sorry. I've got to go.

• 32:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's okay, Molly. It's our fault.

• 32:14Speaker 09

  Thanks very much, Molly.

• 32:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  Thank you very much.

• 32:16Speaker 11

  No, it was really lovely. It was really good fun.

• 32:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay.

• 32:19Speaker 11

  Good luck with the next one.

• 32:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  Thank you very much.

• 32:20Speaker 11

  Not that apparently you need it.

• 32:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, we lost our London Observer, but having one victory in hand, I wasn't too worried. Our next game was Hangman. We would play two rounds, one with Whipple guessing my word, one with me guessing his. The guesser could guess 10 wrong letters before being hung, representing the head, torso, two arms, two legs, the rope, and three lines for the gallows themselves.

• 32:51Speaker 09

  So, all I need to know is how many letters?

• 32:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, and I'll tell you, there are four letters. Now, tell me immediately, is that a good thing to go short or bad?

• 32:58Speaker 09

  Oh, yeah, it's a very good thing to go short.

• 33:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, go for it.

• 33:01Speaker 09

  So, A.

• 33:02Speaker 10

  That is a miss. Nine guesses remain.

• 33:05Speaker 09

  That is a miss. I'm gonna go down the vowels on this, but you don't always. So, I'm gonna go E.

• 33:10Speaker 10

  That is a miss. Eight guesses remain.

• 33:13Speaker 09

  Oh, you have done something with a Y or something, haven't you?

• 33:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  Or have I?

• 33:18Speaker 09

  Exactly. Well, I can do nothing but stick to my strategy, so I'm gonna go for an O.

• 33:24Speaker 10

  That is a hit. You've got an O in the second spot, four letters, the second letter is an O.

• 33:29Speaker 09

  Okay, and so now, I'm going to shift it. That was my attack, my sort of basic attack strategy. So, now I'm going to go for a T.

• 33:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  Beautiful guess.

• 33:38Speaker 10

  That is a miss.

• 33:40Speaker 09

  That is a miss.

• 33:42Speaker 10

  Seven guesses remain.

• 33:43Speaker 09

  Seven guesses remaining.

• 33:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  We don't even have the gallows built yet, but soon we get to your body.

• 33:48Speaker 09

  Um, I'm going to go for an S.

• 33:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's a negatory, Batman.

• 33:52Speaker 10

  The gallows are complete.

• 33:54Speaker 09

  The gallows are complete. Oh, God, you're marching me towards my doom. I am going to go for an R.

• 34:01Speaker 10

  Another miss. Five guesses remain.

• 34:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  If I wanted to march you toward your doom, I'd just challenge you to another game of Connect Four, no offense.

• 34:08Speaker 09

  Yeah, okay. And at this point, I'm going to have to think, I've got to take the strategy that you're being tricky and you've you've gone for something like a J.

• 34:17Speaker 10

  The first letter is a J, so you have a J, the second letter is an O, and two blanks. Five guesses left.

• 34:24Speaker 09

  Um, well, I am going to go for... That's a good question. See, now I'm looking at what words actually work.

• 34:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  I can't imagine there are that many four-letter words starting with J-O, right?

• 34:36Speaker 09

  Well, this is, this is, this is completely sort of, so I'm thinking jowl.

• 34:42Speaker 10

  And that's game wipple.

• 34:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  Beautifully done, Tom Whipple.

• 34:46Speaker 09

  Oh, you're just over praising after the Connect Four disaster.

• 34:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'm, I'm not. I'm real, I'm, I'm really impressed. Jowl, I thought it was a good word.

• 34:54Speaker 09

  Jowl is a really good word.

• 34:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  And you emerged with everything but your head intact, which is, uh, you know, something. Uh, so that was really well done. Um, so you just proved that from the guessers' perspective, you had a strategy that happened to work beautifully there. Could I learn that strategy as well pretty quickly?

• 35:12Speaker 09

  Quite boringly, there's a table in my book, um, which, which got the first letter on the board. The strategy for this, I should say, I spoke to, um, Nick Berry, who's a data scientist at Facebook, who looks into these things in the spare time. And what he said to me was, Tom, I bet you think you're good at Hangman. You're not. And then he said, people who think that, you know, they're good at Hangman, the more naive ones, what they guess first is vowels, which is indeed what I used to do. So I was at the lowest level of sophistication on his strategy. And then he said, if you get a bit more sophisticated, you learn about, um, letter frequency analysis. This is the, it actually started in Baghdad in the ninth century. There was a guy who...

• 35:54Speaker 09

  Went through the Quran and wrote down, a guy called Al-Kindi, he wrote down the frequency that every single letter popped up, and he didn't just do this for fun. He did it because cryptography at the time was almost always based on letter substitution. So for instance, you'd change the word cat to, you'd add one to each letter, so you'd change the word cat to DBU, and then you'd send your letter. And he realised that if he knew that a particular letter popped up more, and he had a big enough corpus of data to decode, he could begin to work out which letters were which. So he blew apart cryptography by doing this. So from that, we have the basic letter frequency in the English language. And he said, "Well, I bet you think this makes you sophisticated."

• 36:35Speaker 09

  And then he said, "Well, actually, it's not, because if you think about it, in Hangman, what you've got is a lot of words you'd never use, a lot of the most common words. You'd never use the word A in Hangman, you'd never use the word and or of or the. I mean, if you, I don't know, if you play Hangman with somebody who puts down the word the, then that really is a time to reconsider your friendships." And so then he produced a different letter frequency of the words in the English language, excluding those. So previously, it was ETAOIN. And if you get rid of those words, you're left with ES for sugar, IARN.

• 37:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  So that's the optimal kind of first guessing streak, yes?

• 37:18Speaker 09

  No, because then he said, "You've forgotten about the amount of information you've been given. I've just been told that this is a four-letter word." Well, the frequency of letters in four-letter words is completely different. Think about it, think of all the endings that you can't have. You can't have the ING ending, you can't have the TION ending. It would be mad if the letter frequency in four-letter words is the same as the letter frequency in the English language. So actually, the most common letter in four-letter words is A, but the most common letter in five-letter words is S, it's E in six-letter words, and it's I in 13-letter words.

• 37:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  Once you land the first letter, then you reassess the kind of word that you're thinking about, or no?

• 38:00Speaker 09

  Well, yeah, so his whole principle behind this, which I certainly subs... To is the really key thing is to get that first letter. And so if you've let's say, as was the case for this, it's a four letter word. And I've guessed A because that's the most common letter in four letter words. Well, if that doesn't come up, you've just changed the search space again. The the frequency of letters in four letter words that don't include the letter A is completely different. So that's your tax strategy for getting the first letter. And then obviously you could extend this if you had a lot of time on your hands. But then I just went back to the letter frequency in the English language. Then I went to the letter frequency facility buggers and and just decided to go J. So I went a bit off piece there.

• 38:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, that was very stressful, though. That was fun. Can we play another?

• 38:49Speaker 09

  I'm sweating. Yeah.

• 38:55Speaker 09

  So I've got I've got a three letter one up on the on my end of things.

• 38:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, so I'm going to use your chart because that's what it's for. And I see that if I have a three letter word, the optimal calling order is A, E, O, I, U, Y, H, B, C, K. So I'd be a fool to ignore your advice, except for the fact that you wrote the advice.

• 39:18Speaker 09

  Well, exactly.

• 39:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  So I have to think that you would have been thinking, well, of course, he's going to call A because it says A right there. And therefore, why would you put an A in, especially when I told you I was going to use your advice? And then I think, well, is he the kind of person who would go to the second most frequent? Or maybe the third, or maybe even the sixth?

• 39:39Speaker 09

  Or I could have just done cat because I just thought you'd have think this way.

• 39:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  Ah, once again, you're deep inside my head. I would like to call Y.

• 39:49Speaker 09

  Y is not on it.

• 39:51Speaker 10

  Y is a miss. Nine guesses remain.

• 39:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  O.

• 39:56Speaker 09

  O is not in it.

• 39:57Speaker 10

  Governor has eight guesses left.

• 39:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  A.

• 40:00Speaker 09

  A is the second letter.

• 40:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  Oh, so you went easy on me. Either that, or you thought you were pulling the double switcheroo. Because A is the first letter in the optimal calling order.

• 40:08Speaker 09

  I've forgotten how many switcheroos were on now.

• 40:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now I think it calls for some psychoanalysis. So what did you have for breakfast today, Tom?

• 40:17Speaker 09

  I had toast and bagels.

• 40:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  Was there jam on your toast?

• 40:22Speaker 09

  I couldn't imagine where you're going. Yes, there was lashings of jam on my toast.

• 40:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'm not familiar with the word lashings, but I'm focusing on the jam. Do you have pets at home?

• 40:34Speaker 09

  I have pet tortoises.

• 40:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hmm, but no feline type pets?

• 40:40Speaker 09

  No.

• 40:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  How do you feel about feline type pets?

• 40:44Speaker 09

  I'm ambivalent towards feline type pets.

• 40:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  C.

• 40:48Speaker 09

  That's the first one.

• 40:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  T?

• 40:50Speaker 09

  I think that would be the one I was going for. I think a treble switcheroo. I'm telling you it was cat.

• 40:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  The minute you said you were ambivalent, because can I tell you why? Nobody's ambivalent about cats. You either love cats or you hate cats.

• 41:02Speaker 09

  You're right. You've got my tail. You've got my tail.

• 41:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  So Hangman ended in a draw. He won his round. I won mine, which meant I'd already achieved my goal of one victory and one draw in four games against the game expert, meaning I could afford to lose the last two games, which was fortunate because, well, here we go.

• 41:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  How about we play Battleship?

• 41:32Speaker 09

  Let's do Battleship.

• 41:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  Is there a large advantage to going first?

• 41:37Speaker 09

  Um, I don't think anyone's particularly done the maths on it, but I don't think it's huge.

• 41:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, Tom, you can go first then.

• 41:42Speaker 09

  Okay, I'm gonna stick it right in the middle at E5.

• 41:46Speaker 10

  And that is a hit.

• 41:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  Uh, congratulations.

• 41:50Speaker 09

  Thank you very much.

• 41:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  So I know that you like to go in the middle as an aggressor, but obviously you know that as an aggressor, it's a good idea to go in the middle. So maybe you wouldn't have put a ship there. On the other hand, you know that I did not know that E5 and you gave me cat for Hangman.

• 42:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  So I'll say E6.

• 42:13Speaker 09

  Okay, E6 is happily a miss. So now I'm on my hunting strategy and I just know that there's a ship either side of this. Um, so I am going to go for E4.

• 42:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  E4 sadly is a miss.

• 42:29Speaker 09

  Okay.

• 42:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  H2.

• 42:30Speaker 09

  H2 is a miss. Going to work round D5.

• 42:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  D5 would be a Mississippi. I will next choose I10.

• 42:40Speaker 09

  I10 is also a miss.

• 42:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, you did lay ships down on the board, correct?

• 42:48Speaker 09

  Rather, you have a photograph to prove it. E6.

• 42:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  That would be a hit.

• 42:52Speaker 10

  So Whipple has two hits, Dubner has none.

• 42:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  I don't know if that was necessary here, but it lowered my self-esteem here. Uh, B1.

• 43:00Speaker 09

  B1 is a miss. Now, the question is whether with E7, I will have sunk your battleship.

• 43:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  Uh, hit.

• 43:07Speaker 09

  Oh, it's a big end.

• 43:07Speaker 10

  That's three hits, no ship sunk.

• 43:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  A8.

• 43:11Speaker 09

  A8 is, I'm sorry, is a miss.

• 43:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  Not that sorry.

• 43:14Speaker 09

  I'm not that sorry at all. Delighted. Okay, E8.

• 43:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hit and sunk.

• 43:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  So here's how I feel. You've had six guesses and you've already sunk my battleship. And I've had five guesses and I don't have a single hit. But I'm going to tell you, I don't feel that badly yet. Because finding the big ships is easier than finding the small ships. So I'm going to take some solace in that.

• 43:42Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 43:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  Is that a false sense of solace?

• 43:43Speaker 09

  Oh, no, no, I think that's completely fair enough. The, uh, it feels more, you know, it feels like a great victory when you sink the aircraft carrier. But in sort of, well, as in almost every way, this is not analogous to naval warfare. There's not, there's not, really not a single way in which this relates to real battleships.

• 44:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  Uh, J3.

• 44:06Speaker 09

  J3 is a miss. H7.

• 44:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  H7 would be a miss.

• 44:11Speaker 09

  Okay.

• 44:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  Tom, close your ears for a minute.

• 44:13Speaker 09

  They're closed.

• 44:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  Dear listener, his H7 was disastrously close to two ships. Thank God.

• 44:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  C10.

• 44:23Speaker 09

  Again a miss. H5.

• 44:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  Interesting choice. It is however also a miss. Hey Tom, close your ears for 35 seconds or so.

• 44:32Speaker 09

  35 seconds, okay, it's coming off.

• 44:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  Dear listener. That was unbelievably close again. Thank God. Hey Tom?

• 44:43Speaker 09

  Yeah?

• 44:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  Alright, so um, I'm still seeking my first hit. I'm doing very not well. Uh, and I feel like I have a strategy that is either not working or just um, not yet. So I'm gonna stick with it for a little longer, uh, and I'll say F1.

• 45:01Speaker 09

  F1 is a miss.

• 45:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  F5.

• 45:04Speaker 09

  F5 is a miss.

• 45:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  J7.

• 45:06Speaker 09

  J7 is a miss.

• 45:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  So I've gotta wonder now, I've really scattered the board. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 scattered guesses and not a single hit. And I can't remember ever playing 10 single first guesses and not a single hit. So I've gotta think that maybe, rather than scattering, you're maybe clustering. And there's a quadrant that I just haven't wandered into where I'll find, uh, the motherload. Would the quadrant include H8?

• 45:36Speaker 09

  It would not.

• 45:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  Again, you did put ships on the board, yes?

• 45:39Speaker 09

  Uh, there were, there are ships, there are photographs to prove it. They're just using their British pluck to evade your artillery.

• 45:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  Alright.

• 45:45Speaker 09

  F8.

• 45:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hit and sunk. You sunk my three-hole ship. So you've now sunk a 4 and a 3. So I can tell you, because you're my friend, and because I think you're gonna beat me anyway. I'm worried about my strategy now. Do you understand why I'm worried besides the fact that I'm behind?

• 46:01Speaker 09

  Is it because you've been putting ships next to each other?

• 46:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hmm. Yes.

• 46:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  Thinking that I would...

• 46:11Speaker 09

  Confound me with it.

• 46:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  Confound you. But if indeed I've done that consistently, then the confounding will, will come to a crashing halt.

• 46:19Speaker 09

  But see, you began that by saying because I'm your friend. So I think you're just trying to gain my trust so that you can lie.

• 46:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  I appreciate your thinking of me as strategically as that. And as nastily as that.

• 46:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  Clearly, my strategy was a hard failure, an embarrassment. I did finally get a few hits, including Whipple's destroyer, and that's the ship with just two holes, the hardest one to find.

• 46:46Speaker 09

  So you've got rid of my most valuable ship?

• 46:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  Alright, well, that's something.

• 46:51Speaker 09

  So, people who play this competitively, which are vanishingly few, would not generally put many ships on the outside of the board.

• 47:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  Why's that?

• 47:03Speaker 09

  Well, because if you think about the hunt strategy, so, well, once you've targeted it, once you've hit someone's ship, you then have to look at the four squares either side of that hit to see which way the ship's going, to see if it's going up, down, left, right. If you've got it on the edge of the board, you've immediately put it in a situation. And for exactly the same reason, you know, ideally, you wouldn't put ships next to each other, because then there's a chance in hitting one, that just in your search strategy, you're going to get a hit on two. Now, because that's a strategy, obviously, you then have to mitigate it, which is why I put one of mine on the edge of the board, because, you know, if people know that it's

• 47:46Speaker 09

  bad to them on the edge of the board, then it's, sometimes you want to mess around with them and put some on the edge of the board.

• 47:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  So it sounds as though you're saying that your planting strategy, your setting up ship strategy, is to place them what seems to be randomly.

• 48:00Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 48:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  While avoiding the edges.

• 48:02Speaker 09

  Semi-randomly, avoiding the edges, avoiding putting them together, but occasionally putting them together and putting them on the edges, if that doesn't sound too ludicrous.

• 48:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, yeah, no, that makes sense, that's a kind of, right, an 80/20-ish kind of rule, okay.

• 48:18Speaker 09

  I'm gonna take a punt on you having some mad psychology with this, and I'm gonna go for I9. Oh, no!

• 48:25Speaker 10

  That was a very good hit. Very good hit.

• 48:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  Tom Whipple.

• 48:32Speaker 09

  Excellent, well...

• 48:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  Well, you've won.

• 48:34Speaker 09

  Well, we're not there yet!

• 48:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, no, no, no, I can't, because mathematically...

• 48:38Speaker 09

  No, no, I've won, you're right. Yeah, I've won.

• 48:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  Alright, let me try to at least find your battleship, because that is the name of the game. So I will call it...

• 48:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  G9. G9 is a hit. There we go. Well, it's an honourable end. Well, again, Pyrrhic victories are victories in some fashion. Your fleet equipped itself well. J9, hit and sunk. To the winner, Tom Whipple. Congratulations. Well played. You too.

• 49:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'm so shamefully embarrassed by my horrible play here, but hopefully it can help another player win another day. Yeah, it's demonstrated to a point. You're a cautionary tale in Battleship.

• 49:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  It was time for our final game of the day. Rock, paper, scissors. We agreed to play best of nine throws. We used to say, "Rock, paper, scissors, says shoot." That's our rhythm, but tell me what you do. I normally do one, two, three, and then present. You don't say "shoot," though. Very pacifist version of rock, paper, scissors. One, two, three, present. It sounds like what baboons do with their bottoms, doesn't it? So you're running the show here, so we'll say, "One, two, three, present," is what we're going to say? Yeah. All right, and we'll say it the same. Are you ready to play then? Okay, let's do it. Okay, so let me just say something before we go. On the first throw, I'm throwing rock, okay? Ready? Okay, let's do it. One, two, three, present. Paper. Rock.

• 50:14Speaker 10

  A win for Tom.

• 50:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  Win for Tom, and I told the truth. Yeah, okay. One. One, two, three, present. Paper. Scissors.

• 50:23Speaker 10

  Scissors cuts paper. That is a win for Steven.

• 50:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  One, two, three, present. Rock. Scissors.

• 50:29Speaker 10

  Rock crushes scissors, and that is a win for Tom. So that is 2-1, Tom.

• 50:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  One. One, two, three, present. Paper. Scissors.

• 50:38Speaker 10

  Scissors cuts paper. That is a win for Dubner. So it's 2-2.

• 50:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  2-2. One. One, two, three, present. Rock. Scissors.

• 50:47Speaker 10

  Rock crushes scissors. That is a takeaway for Whipple. That is 3-2, Whipple.

• 50:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  You may have noticed by now that I've employed four scissors consecutively. I have, I have, and I think you flagging it up means that I'm definitely going to do rock next time. It's what I call the super seamstress. A seamstress, I understand, is three scissors in a row, but the super seamstress, I think I may have invented the super seamstress. I'm not sure. I think that's accepted in sort of competition play, is that right? Yeah, I know there are many names for these patterns, yeah. So let's see what we've got. Ready? One, two, three, present.

• 51:20Speaker 09

  Rock.

• 51:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  Scissors.

• 51:21Speaker 10

  Okay, rock crushes scissors. That is a win for Whipple. It is now four-two.

• 51:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  One, two, three, present.

• 51:29Speaker 09

  Paper.

• 51:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  Rock.

• 51:31Speaker 10

  Paper covers rock. That is a win for Whipple. It is five-two Whipple.

• 51:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  One. One, two, three, present.

• 51:37Speaker 09

  Scissors.

• 51:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  Rock.

• 51:39Speaker 10

  Rock crushes scissors. That is a win for Dubner. It is five-three Whipple.

• 51:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  One. One, two, three, present.

• 51:46Speaker 09

  Paper.

• 51:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Paper. That's a draw.

• 51:48Speaker 10

  That's a draw.

• 51:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  One. One, two, three, present.

• 51:51Speaker 09

  Paper.

• 51:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  Paper. That's a draw. One. One, two, three, present.

• 51:57Speaker 09

  Paper.

• 51:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  Rock. Ah, well done. That was a, that was a beautiful.

• 52:01Speaker 09

  Well, that was really tense. That was just good for the game.

• 52:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  Very well done. Very well done. So now that we've heard me get crushed by you, the master, give us your masterful advice on rock, paper, scissors?

• 52:11Speaker 09

  So it's, I mean, the first thing to say about rock, paper, scissors is there shouldn't be a strategy. You know, the optimal strategy is everyone plays randomly and you're equally likely to win or equally likely to lose, which makes it a fantastic psychology problem because humans are incapable of being random. The reason I don't know what to do is there was a bunch of Chinese researchers who decided that they were going to find themselves a phenomenally indulgent grant awarding body and they were going to get 300 students to play 360 games of rock, paper, scissors. And then they were going to look for strategies or look for tics, the, the non-randomness that could be exploited.

• 52:52Speaker 09

  And the ones they found is sort of almost embarrassingly is, is an insight into how the human brain works. So if you lose, if say my rock beats your scissors, then you'll think, right, I need to make these scissors more powerful. I'm going to go to a more powerful thing. So I'm going to go to rock. And so if if you lose, then I have to think next time, if you lost on scissors, you're going to play rock, so I need to shift up to paper. And if you win, then you think, well, that went well, I think I'll stick with that one. And so if you won on rock, then you would be likely to stay on rock. And so I should go on paper. It's it's giving you an edge. I mean, I don't think it's, you know, there was, there's a huge element of chance, and

• 53:35Speaker 09

  I can't say it would have actually made the difference in our game as opposed to being chance, but it gives you just that small edge in a game that's meant to be a purely random game of chance.

• 53:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  So I assume that according to your master's strategy, that my subversion strategy of throwing, let's say, five scissors in a row to create the appearance of basically lunacy is a bad strategy?

• 53:55Speaker 09

  Um, well, I wasn't even, I was just sticking with that particular strategy. So I wasn't particularly noticing. The only thing I would say is when we drew, I went with a different strategy, which is I went paper, because scissors, contrary to what you were doing, are actually the, they're the least used statistically of all of them.

• 54:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  Scissors are the least, I assume that rock is the most?

• 54:17Speaker 09

  Yeah, they use scissors, the other two, paper and rock, are pretty equal, but scissors are 29.6% of the time when they've been analyzed.

• 54:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  So Tom, you have crushed me at rock, paper, scissors. You beat me soundly at Battleship. We hung each other once in Hangman, and I got lucky on Connect Four. So here's my question for you. Having become master, or at least a surrogate master for the proper masters of all these games, and having written this book about how to win games and beat people, is there any element of joy that's diluted when you win by knowing the optimal way? It's not cheating, but it's kind of a different version of gaining an advantage over someone else?

• 55:04Speaker 09

  I always, I think joy is the wrong paradigm for this. Joy is the sort of thing that people say, oh, it's the taking part that counts. It's the, it's the battle cry of the loser. Losers look for joy, I look for victory. And that's what I've got, and then I'll go and live my cold, shallow life, but I'll have, I'll have won. And, you know, who's the real loser?

• 55:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  Coming up next time on Freakonomics Radio, is it really true that Scandinavia is the happiest place on Earth?

• 55:37Speaker 12

  Yeah, I definitely am happier.

• 55:39Speaker 13

  It's about togetherness. It's about pleasure. It's about warmth.

• 55:44Speaker 12

  I regularly forget to lock car and/or house. I do leave my children outside to sleep.

• 55:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  And why even economists are getting on the happiness train and putting aside traditional measures like GDP. My god, let's get serious about the quality of our lives and stop this nonsense. That's next time on Freakonomics Radio.

• 56:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Irvan Gunja. Our staff also includes Alison Kreglo, Greg Rippon, Alvin Melathe, Harry Huggins, and Zach Lepinski. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. The entire archive is available on the Stitcher app or at Freakonomics.com, where we also publish transcripts and show notes and much more. If you would like to hear the entire archive ad-free, plus lots of bonus episodes, go to StitcherPremium.com/Freakonomics. We can also be found on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, or via email at [email protected]. Freakonomics Radio also plays on many NPR stations. Check your local station for details. As always, thanks for listening.

• 57:01Speaker 04

  Stitcher.

• 57:08Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 57:40Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 58:25Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 58:48Speaker 13

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