I don’t base my play based on Don’s abilities. I place my ships, and make my calls, based on the way I would play if I were playing any of you.
Don has played against other opponents (other staff members), and he plays the same way with them. They, like me, do not place their ships, or make their calls, based on Don’s style of play.
I’m currently reading an excellent book on this topic, The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow, a science writer who’s also a professor of Physics at Caltech. Well worth the read. I personally wish it would get a little bit more mathematical, as in actually giving formulae and working out examples, but the book is a conceptual one and not a textbook on probability; for someone looking for a “big idea” discussion of probability and how it works, though, it’s terrific!
I’d say that his strategy is not so much worse than “random”. Really, the worst part about it is the psychological block that most opponents have against putting a boat in A1.
Where does he put his ships?
This is probably too harsh, but what if you played a few games and took advantage of the bottom right? Would he switch up his strategy?
My brothers and I did this pretty often precisely because the other person expects you not to do it. If they don’t detect the adjacent boat, the odds are that they will wait a long time before coming back to test that location again. Of course then we became aware of each others strategies and we would vary the use of that (and other) strategies based on how often/how recent it had been used, etc.
Regarding the OP, it’s possible the person is more satisfied with following a sequential pattern than winning, or maybe he doesn’t understand winning, or can’t project himself mentally that far forward to make it a goal, in which case there may be no mental gain to a random approach.
He puts his ships all around the board in no particular order, and no, I don’t think he’d change his play if I took advantage of his strategy.
Would Don be willing to try out other patterns? For example A1, B2, C3, etc. to create a diagonal.