247. How to Win Games and Beat People

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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• 0:44Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  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. Brilliantly boring since 1865 is a registered mark of the PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. PNC Bank, National Association, Member FDIC.

• 1:58Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:37Speaker 01

  Are you someone for whom the wheel never stops turning? You're always looking for some way to do it a little bit better next time around.

• 2:44Speaker 02

  People say, oh, it's the taking part that counts. It's the battle cry of the loser.

• 2:50Speaker 03

  You're comparing yourself to a different standard than other people might be comparing themselves, a very high standard. That's probably, in part, why you do finish things.

• 2:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  We learn this emotional pleasure that comes from taking control.

• 3:08Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 3:12Speaker 04

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

• 3:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's an activity that is inherently communal.

• 3:22Speaker 05

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

• 3:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  And it's an activity in which the mere participation brings joy, regardless of outcome, right?

• 3:36Speaker 02

  Losers look for joy. I look for victory.

• 3:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  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.

• 4:11Speaker 06

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

• 4:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  I love to play games. There, I said it. 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 of civilization. My favorite game, for instance, is Backgammon.

• 4:53Speaker 04

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

• 4:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  And that is?

• 5:00Speaker 04

  Mary Poppins, the author of The Monopolist, a book about the secret history of the board game Monopoly.

• 5:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  Poppins knows the history of other games as well.

• 5:07Speaker 04

  OK, so Senet goes back to Egypt, around 3,500 B.C. Go and

• 5:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  Liu Bo.

• 5:15Speaker 04

  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.

• 5:33Stephen 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.

• 5:44Speaker 04

  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.

• 5:53Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 6:01Speaker 04

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

• 6:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  Also, child labor was going out of fashion.

• 6:08Speaker 04

  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.

• 6:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  Fast forward now, a few more generations.

• 6:23Speaker 07

  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.

• 6:33Stephen 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...

• 6:48Speaker 08

  Takano Koko.

• 6:50Speaker 07

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

• 6:57Speaker 09

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

• 7:03Speaker 08

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

• 7:03Speaker 07

  We're gonna find out.

• 7:05Speaker 09

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

• 7:09Speaker 07

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

• 7:15Speaker 08

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

• 7:22Speaker 09

  That's horrible.

• 7:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  Greg May is the founder of The Uncommons.

• 7:29Speaker 05

  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.

• 7:36Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 7:43Speaker 05

  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 Reign, 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.

• 8:07Speaker 10

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

• 8:13Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 8:17Speaker 10

  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.

• 8:46Stephen 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. According to Luke Crane, who runs that division, last year, nearly a million backers pledged more than $140 million to games. A lot of these, however, 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 $1.6 billion a year. Video game sales in the US total more than $23.5 billion a year. So for every dollar we spend on board games and puzzles, we spend nearly $15 on video

• 9:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  games. Whatever the case, the instinct to play some kind of game with some kind of opponent is extraordinarily common and long-lived.

• 9:40Speaker 04

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

• 9:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Mary Pallanigan.

• 9:48Speaker 04

  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.

• 10:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  Pallan herself is a gamer.

• 10:20Speaker 04

  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.

• 10:52Speaker 02

  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.

• 11:06Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 11:10Speaker 02

  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.

• 11:53Stephen 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.

• 12:02Speaker 02

  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.

• 12:21Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 12:24Speaker 02

  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.

• 12:43Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 12:44Speaker 02

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

• 12:50Stephen 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.

• 13:08Stephen 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.

• 13:15Speaker 02

  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.

• 13:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  If you've been keeping up with Freakonomics Radio, you know this is self-improvement month. We've been trying to help you become more productive, to master a skill, to increase your grit. Today, how to win any game, if not with grace necessarily, with Tom Whipple as our guide and his book as our bible.

• 13:48Speaker 02

  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.

• 14:03Stephen 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?

• 14:23Speaker 02

  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.

• 14:48Stephen 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.

• 14:54Speaker 02

  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 so 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 a 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 aren't trying to get this as high as possible, and

• 15:39Speaker 02

  instead of taking ones from the outside, the ones on either side, they take the one from the middle, which means that 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.

• 16:03Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 16:10Speaker 02

  Kurt Steiner.

• 16:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  who had a relatively simple goal in life.

• 16:13Speaker 02

  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

• 16:55Speaker 02

  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 eighty-eight stone skips.

• 17:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  And does that make him something like a world champion?

• 17:17Speaker 02

  I think it exceeded the previous one by more than twenty. 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 thirty degrees and he throws so fast, he uses-

• 17:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  Thirty degrees down or up?

• 17:48Speaker 02

  Thirty degrees angle to the horizontal.

• 17:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  What would look like straight into the water.

• 17:52Speaker 02

  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 five degrees.

• 18:29Stephen 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?

• 19:05Speaker 02

  I'm absolutely up for that.

• 19:09Stephen 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.

• 19:40Speaker 02

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

• 19:45Stephen 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.

• 20:01Speaker 02

  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.

• 20:09Stephen 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?

• 20:16Speaker 02

  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.

• 20:25Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 20:28Speaker 02

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

• 20:35Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 20:43Speaker 02

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

• 20:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  But soon, he recaptures the psychological high ground.

• 20:51Speaker 02

  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.

• 20:58Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 21:03Speaker 02

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

• 21:24Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 21:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  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. Brilliantly boring since 1865 is a registered mark of the PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. PNC Bank, National Association, Member FDIC.

• 22:45Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 23:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  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.

• 23:30Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 23:52Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 23:54Stephen 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, maybe referees, because we want to make sure that, no offense to you, but I cheat a lot at everything, so.

• 24:08Speaker 02

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

• 24:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  Well said, yeah, okay. So I've got here the executive producer of Freakonomics Radio, Irva Gunja. Irva, can you just say hello?

• 24:21Speaker 11

  Hello.

• 24:22Stephen 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?

• 24:30Speaker 11

  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.

• 24:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  Let's hear it.

• 24:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  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?

• 24:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, Molly, also, hello.

• 24:52Speaker 12

  Hi.

• 24:53Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 25:02Speaker 02

  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.

• 25:26Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 25:27Speaker 02

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

• 25:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, you want to play yellow or red?

• 25:32Speaker 02

  I'll play yellow.

• 25:35Stephen 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.

• 26:01Speaker 02

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

• 26:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, so I have only two options, I think, sensible options, but maybe you've got me overthinking my Connect 4 strategy.

• 26:13Speaker 02

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

• 26:17Stephen 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.

• 26:26Speaker 02

  So I'll put mine down in column 5.

• 26:31Stephen 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.

• 26:48Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 26:51Speaker 02

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

• 26:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  Oh, but just the...

• 26:59Speaker 12

  I love the panic in your voice, just already.

• 27:01Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 27:05Speaker 02

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

• 27:11Speaker 12

  Not to instill you with more fear, but so...

• 27:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  Oh, great, Molly, come on.

• 27:14Speaker 12

  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...

• 27:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'm Kanye, then?

• 27:27Speaker 12

  Ooh, yeah.

• 27:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think you're Kanye.

• 27:28Speaker 12

  Yeah, you're Kanye.

• 27:29Speaker 02

  Kanye is the best...

• 27:30Speaker 12

  Well, Beyoncé.

• 27:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  Did she go first?

• 27:32Speaker 02

  I think you've heard of the Fisher Spassky chess match.

• 27:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  I have.

• 27:36Speaker 02

  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 when they're backstage? Well, they had a Connect 4 tournament and... Kanye West, who describes himself in his music as God's vessel, um, lost 8-1 to Beyonce.

• 28:04Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 28:07Speaker 02

  She is indeed my inspiration for this, um, for this game.

• 28:11Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 28:16Speaker 02

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

• 28:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  Our Connect4 match went on and on for the next 20 minutes. I'm gonna go 4C.

• 28:27Speaker 02

  I am going to go to block off your potential 3 in a row on the bottom.

• 28:33Stephen 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.

• 28:39Speaker 02

  That 3 in a row worries me quite a lot.

• 28:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  Question, has the publisher already written you the check?

• 28:44Speaker 02

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

• 28:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  Until we were down to an inevitable finish.

• 28:53Speaker 11

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

• 29:01Speaker 02

  It's doom, isn't it?

• 29:02Speaker 12

  At least you're losing with humor.

• 29:04Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 29:09Speaker 02

  And are you gonna claim the 5 in a row or the 4 in a row diagonally that gives you?

• 29:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  Um, I am going to claim Connect 9.

• 29:16Speaker 11

  Game Dubner.

• 29:18Speaker 02

  Oh dear, it's not good for Blighty.

• 29:20Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 29:28Speaker 02

  Well, that's very, very sweet for you to say I stumbled, but what I will say in my defense, in some senses, what we just had is the classic Connect4 game. Sometimes you'll lose because someone will spot a cunning little fork, or you won't spot that someone's got 3 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?

• 29:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  I haven't. I like it, though.

• 29:55Speaker 02

  The Germans have a word for everything, and it's not surprising that maybe in the Middle Europe or 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.

• 30:07Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 30:14Speaker 02

  Well, there you go. So that's Zugswang. We mentioned the epic struggle between Kanye West and Beyonce 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 Alice. Now, obviously, I could have interviewed Kanye West for my book. I could have interviewed Beyonce Knowles. But why interview either of them when I can go to a Dutch computer scientist called Victor Alice? He had designed a program that always played the optimal move in Connect Four. And it knew it had been proven mathematically to be perfect. There are four and a half trillion different combinations in Connect Four. But what he said to me is he was a sort of relatively keen player.

• 30:57Speaker 02

  And he says, I bet you've lost games of Connect Four 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 Zugswang. 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. 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.

• 31:43Speaker 02

  But you have won on row number three, and you won. And that's why.

• 31:47Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 31:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, here they go.

• 31:53Speaker 12

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

• 31:56Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 31:58Speaker 02

  Thanks very much, Molly.

• 31:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  Thank you very much.

• 32:00Speaker 12

  No, it was really lovely. It was really good fun. Good luck with the next one.

• 32:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  Thank you very much.

• 32:04Speaker 12

  Not that apparently you need it.

• 32:06Stephen 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.

• 32:34Speaker 02

  So all I need to know is how many letters?

• 32:36Stephen 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?

• 32:41Speaker 02

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

• 32:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  Alright, go for it.

• 32:44Speaker 02

  So, A.

• 32:45Speaker 11

  That is a miss. Nine guesses remain.

• 32:48Speaker 02

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

• 32:53Speaker 11

  That is a miss. Eight guesses remain.

• 32:56Speaker 02

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

• 32:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  Or have I?

• 33:00Speaker 02

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

• 33:07Speaker 11

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

• 33:12Speaker 02

  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.

• 33:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  Beautiful guess.

• 33:22Speaker 11

  That is a miss.

• 33:23Speaker 02

  That is a miss. Damn.

• 33:25Speaker 11

  Seven guesses remain.

• 33:26Speaker 02

  Seven guesses remain.

• 33:28Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 33:32Speaker 02

  I'm going to go for an S.

• 33:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's a negatory, Batman.

• 33:36Speaker 11

  The gallows are complete.

• 33:37Speaker 02

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

• 33:44Speaker 11

  Another miss. Five guesses remain.

• 33:47Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 33:51Speaker 02

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

• 34:00Speaker 11

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

• 34:07Speaker 02

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

• 34:16Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 34:20Speaker 02

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

• 34:25Speaker 11

  And that's game with Paul.

• 34:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  Beautifully done. Tom Whipple.

• 34:29Speaker 02

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

• 34:33Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 34:38Speaker 02

  Jowl is a really good word.

• 34:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  And you emerged with everything but your head intact, which is, you know, something. So that was really well done. 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?

• 34:55Speaker 02

  Quite boringly, there's a table in my book, which got the first letter on the board. The strategy for this, I should say, I spoke to 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 guessed 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 letter frequency analysis. This is the, it actually started in Baghdad in the ninth century. There was a guy who went through the Quran and wrote down, a

• 35:39Speaker 02

  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, that 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 change the word cat to DBU, and then you'd send your letter. And he realized 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 is, makes you sophisticated. And then he said, well, actually, it's not. Because if you think about it in Hangman.

• 36:24Speaker 02

  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, 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 E T A O I N. And if you get rid of those, those words, you're left with E S for sugar, I A R N.

• 36:58Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 37:02Speaker 02

  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 I N G ending, you can't have the T I O N 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.

• 37:38Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 37:43Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, so his whole principle behind this, which I certainly subscribe 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 for silly buggers and, and just decided to go J. So I went a bit off piece there.

• 38:27Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 38:32Speaker 02

  I'm sweating. Yeah.

• 38:38Speaker 02

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

• 38:41Stephen 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.

• 39:01Speaker 02

  Well, exactly.

• 39:02Stephen 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?

• 39:23Speaker 02

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

• 39:26Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 39:32Speaker 02

  Y is not on it.

• 39:35Speaker 11

  Y is a miss. Nine guesses remain.

• 39:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  O.

• 39:39Speaker 02

  O is not in it.

• 39:40Speaker 11

  Dubner has eight guesses left.

• 39:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  A.

• 39:43Speaker 02

  A is the second letter.

• 39:45Stephen 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.

• 39:51Speaker 02

  I've forgotten how many switcheroos were on there.

• 39:54Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 40:00Speaker 02

  I had toast and bagels.

• 40:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  Was there jam on your toast?

• 40:05Speaker 02

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

• 40:10Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 40:17Speaker 02

  I have pet tortoises.

• 40:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hmm, but no feline-type pets?

• 40:24Speaker 02

  No.

• 40:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  How do you feel about feline-type pets?

• 40:27Speaker 02

  I'm ambivalent towards feline-type pets.

• 40:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  C.

• 40:32Speaker 02

  That's the first one.

• 40:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  T?

• 40:34Speaker 02

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

• 40:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  Well, 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.

• 40:45Speaker 02

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

• 40:53Stephen 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.

• 41:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  How about we play Battleship?

• 41:16Speaker 02

  Let's do Battleship.

• 41:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  Is there a large advantage to going first?

• 41:20Speaker 02

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

• 41:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, Tom, you can go first then.

• 41:25Speaker 02

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

• 41:29Speaker 11

  And that is a hit.

• 41:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  Uh, congratulations.

• 41:33Speaker 02

  Thank you very much.

• 41:34Stephen 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.

• 41:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  So I'll say E6.

• 41:56Speaker 02

  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, so I am going to go for E4.

• 42:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  E4 sadly is a miss.

• 42:12Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 42:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  H2.

• 42:14Speaker 02

  H2 is a miss. Gonna work round D5.

• 42:17Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 42:23Speaker 02

  I10 is also a miss.

• 42:26Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 42:31Speaker 02

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

• 42:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  That would be a hit.

• 42:35Speaker 11

  So Whipple has two hits, Dubner has none.

• 42:37Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 42:43Speaker 02

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

• 42:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  Uh, hit.

• 42:50Speaker 02

  Ah, it's a big'un.

• 42:51Speaker 11

  That's three hits. No ship sunk.

• 42:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  A8.

• 42:54Speaker 02

  A8 is, I'm sorry, a miss.

• 42:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  Not that sorry.

• 42:58Speaker 02

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

• 43:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hit and sunk.

• 43:09Stephen 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 gonna tell you, I don't feel that badly yet, because finding the big ships is easier than finding the small ships. So I'm gonna take some solace in that.

• 43:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  Is that a false sense of solace?

• 43:27Speaker 02

  Oh, no, no. I think that's completely fair enough. 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.

• 43:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Uh, J3.

• 43:49Speaker 02

  J3 is amiss. H7.

• 43:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  H7 would be amiss.

• 43:54Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 43:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  Tom, close your ears for a minute.

• 43:57Speaker 02

  They're closed.

• 43:58Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 44:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  C10.

• 44:06Speaker 02

  Again, amiss. H5.

• 44:10Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 44:16Speaker 02

  35 seconds. Okay, it's coming off.

• 44:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  Dear listener, that was unbelievably close. Again, thank God. Hey, Tom?

• 44:26Speaker 02

  Yeah?

• 44:27Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 44:44Speaker 02

  F1 is amiss.

• 44:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  F5.

• 44:47Speaker 02

  F5 is amiss.

• 44:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  J7.

• 44:49Speaker 02

  J7 is amiss.

• 44:51Stephen 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 is a quadrant that I just haven't wandered into where I'll find the motherload. Would the quadrant include H8?

• 45:19Speaker 02

  It would not.

• 45:20Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 45:22Speaker 02

  There are ships, there are photographs to prove it, they're just using their British pluck to evade your artillery. F8.

• 45:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hit and sunk. You sunk my three-hole ship. So you've now sunk a four and a three. 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?

• 45:45Speaker 02

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

• 45:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hmm. Yes.

• 45:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  Thinking that I would...

• 45:54Speaker 02

  Confound me with it.

• 45:55Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 46:02Speaker 02

  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.

• 46:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  I appreciate your thinking of me as strategically as that, and as nastily as that.

• 46:20Stephen 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.

• 46:29Speaker 02

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

• 46:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  Alright, well, that's something.

• 46:34Speaker 02

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

• 46:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  Why's that?

• 46:47Speaker 02

  Well, because if you think about the hunt strategy, so 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

• 47:29Speaker 02

  that it's 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.

• 47:34Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 47:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  While avoiding the edges.

• 47:46Speaker 02

  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.

• 47:52Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 48:01Speaker 02

  I'm gonna take a punt on you having some mad psychology with this, and I'm gonna go for I9.

• 48:07Speaker 11

  Oh, no! That was a very good hit. Very good hit.

• 48:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  Tom Whipple.

• 48:16Speaker 02

  Excellent. Well?

• 48:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  Well, you've won.

• 48:18Speaker 02

  Well, we're not there yet.

• 48:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  No, no, no, I can't, because mathematically-

• 48:21Speaker 02

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

• 48:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, let me try at least find your battleship, because that is the name of the game. So I will call it G9.

• 48:34Speaker 02

  G9 is a hit. There we go. Well, it's an honorable end.

• 48:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  Well, again, Pyrrhic victories are victories in some fashion.

• 48:42Speaker 02

  Your fleet equipped itself well.

• 48:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  J9, hit and sunk to the winner, Tom Whipple. Congratulations, well played.

• 48:50Speaker 02

  You too.

• 48:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'm so shamefully embarrassed by my horrible play here, but hopefully it can help another player win another day.

• 49:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's demonstrated to the point, you're a cautionary tale in Battleship.

• 49:13Stephen 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.

• 49:57Speaker 11

  A win for Tom.

• 49:58Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 50:06Speaker 11

  Scissors cuts paper. That is a win for Stephen.

• 50:08Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 50:13Speaker 11

  Rock crushes scissors, and that is a win for Tom. So that is two, one, Tom.

• 50:17Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 50:22Speaker 11

  Scissors cuts paper. That is a win for Dubner. So it's two all.

• 50:26Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 50:31Speaker 11

  Rock crushes scissors. That is a takeaway for Whipple. That is three, two, Whipple.

• 50:35Stephen 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. Rock. Scissors.

• 51:05Speaker 11

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

• 51:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  One, two, three. Present.

• 51:12Speaker 02

  Paper.

• 51:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  Rock.

• 51:14Speaker 11

  Paper covers rock. That is a win for Whipple. It is 5-2 Whipple.

• 51:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  One. One, two, three.

• 51:20Speaker 02

  Present.

• 51:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  Scissors. Rock.

• 51:22Speaker 11

  Rock crushes scissors. That is a win for Dubner. It is 5-3 Whipple.

• 51:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  One. One, two, three.

• 51:29Speaker 02

  Present.

• 51:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  Paper. Paper. That's a draw.

• 51:31Speaker 11

  That's a draw.

• 51:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  One. One, two, three.

• 51:34Speaker 02

  Present.

• 51:35Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 51:39Speaker 02

  Present.

• 51:40Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 51:44Speaker 02

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

• 51:46Stephen 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?

• 51:54Speaker 02

  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 rewarding 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.

• 52:36Speaker 02

  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 I can't say it would have

• 53:19Speaker 02

  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.

• 53:27Stephen 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.

• 53:39Speaker 02

  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.

• 53:57Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 54:00Speaker 02

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

• 54:08Stephen 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?

• 54:47Speaker 02

  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?

• 55:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  Coming up next week on Freakonomics Radio, our month of self-improvement concludes with a person whose entire life is dedicated to self-improvement.

• 55:25Speaker 13

  My name is Tim Ferriss. I am a human guinea pig and professional dilettante.

• 55:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  Tim Ferriss, charlatan or wizard? The man behind The Four Hour Work Week and other four-hour books tells us everything he knows about self-improvement.

• 55:40Speaker 13

  Good way to trap your monkey mind on paper, so it doesn't distract you and sabotage you for the rest of the day.

• 55:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  And his obsessions.

• 55:47Speaker 13

  It's one of these fixations that I've not been able to get rid of.

• 55:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  You are a weird dude. That's next time on Freakonomics Radio.

• 55:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC Studios and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Irva Gunja. Our staff also includes Jake Howitt, Merritt Jacob, Christopher Wirth, Greg Rosalsky, Kashima Hilevich, Alison Hockenberry, and Caroline English. Thanks also to Molly Fleming for being our London-based referee. You can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. And please come visit Freakonomics.com, where you can find our entire podcast archive, as well as a complete transcript of every episode, along with music credits and lots of extras. Thanks for listening.

• 56:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  Is that a surrender?

• 56:41Speaker 02

  This is not a surrender. No, no, no, no. Britannia will still rule the waves.

• 56:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by EverPure. Is the value of AI not living up to the promise? The problem is probably your data, not your AI models. When it's scattered across different systems, getting your data AI-ready is a challenge. You keep your AI waiting, and everything slows down. EverPure unifies your data, so you can see it, understand it, and control it all from one simple place, and get it AI-ready fast. Unlock the true value of your AI at everpuredata.com.

• 57:30Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 58:01Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 58:39Speaker 14

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