What do you do if you, a modest amateur, find yourself invited to join a game by experts?
Imagine the situation: you’re in a hotel, it’s belting down outside, you’re stuck inside, and a group of Bridge / Scrabble / whatever players invite you to join them. Perhaps the Bridge players need a fourth person, for example. Whatever the game, it’s a purely social game and you are not playing for money. Anyway, you happen to know that these are expert players - national, international, or world class - and you are most definitely not. What do you do?
And what about the reverse? I know we have some game experts here. How do you accommodate a player of vastly lower skill level? What do you do if a random group invites you to join them?
Hell no. I made the mistake of playing chess with a guy who was much, much better. I didn’t care that I got trounced, it was that he couldn’t hide his irritation.
Maybe something like Scrabble or golf where you aren’t going to hurt your partner and you can enjoy the lesson but noway for something which you would be on a team.
I’ve gone golfing with people at the semipro level and as long as you don’t hold up their game too much, and they are good natured about it, then it’s OK, but people at a world class are much more likely to be far more serious about it.
I point out I’m not very good or even don’t know the game at all and if they’re cool with it I’m cool with it. Mind you: the most common case for me has been mus (a card game that’s very popular in Spain) and so far the reaction has always been “uh… then no.” OK, worse case scenario I’ll die without learning how to play mus. Le sigh! I still kill at dominoes, you gameist bitches.
If it turns out that they thought they were cool with it but weren’t, or don’t have the patience to teach / let me do things at my own speed, I can always leave.
For the case where I know more, I try to copy what Abuelita did. She taught us both games she liked and games she didn’t much like, but she was always patient with our mistakes; she knew how to build up the teaching. Often there would be a first game which she already explained involved “simplified rules” (think for example chess with no castling), then the more complex rules would get introduced. Each given match had coherent rules from beginning to end: if a match of chess did not involve castling, it did not, period. Once you’d been given the whole set of rules, she would sometimes ask “are you sure?” when you started a move: the first times, it would be because she saw something she believed you’d missed, she wanted us to either find that better move or explain that we’d seen it but preferred this other option (reasons had to be explained). Eventually she’d ask “are you sure?” just because, which came in handy later when I had teachers who used that technique to make students nervous…
I might be willing to give it a go. But if they can’t accommodate me, in a way that keeps me engaged and interested, I’ll drop out pretty quick, I’m sure.
If they just want to wiz along, leaving me baffled and defeated, lots of heavy sighing and eye rolling at my ignorance, it’s not going to work out probably. But if they’ll offer me lots of advice and are good spirited about my errors and missteps, it will be okay, I think.
So, it depends on the players I’d say, first and for most.
For bridge, it would be a problem, since one of the three would have to agree to have you as a partner.
Most people who are that good would have enough respect for the game to be gracious about playing with a person below their skill level.
I unknowingly accepted an invitation to play chess in a youth hostel in Romania with a guy who turned out to be a grand master. I didn’t beat him, of course, but a couple of times he said “good move”, which now seems flattering in retrospect. Later on he complained that the Russian chess magazines “only published the games I lost”. Years later, he became a grand master, and quite a well-known and celebrated one.
I would give most things a go. Maybe not MMA though.
Years ago I was playing tennis with two friends. I was sitting out while they played. On the next court was a young guy hitting first serves from a basket of balls. I asked him if he wanted someone to return. He said he was about to start second serves and would be happy to have someone over the net. Taking his first serve in the deuce court I took my racket back for a backhand and the ball passed me on the forehand. The guy’s spin serves were like nothing I had ever seen and it took me a while to start making much contact.
After he had finished his serves we just rallied for 15 or 20 minutes and it was tremendous fun. It turned out the guy was in Sydney to play in a televised international under 18 tournament. He was many grades better than me and in fact his superiority ended up being the reason I could rally pretty well. He hit the ball so hard that I gradually concentrated on defense, keeping my swing short and trying for a little topspin. The ball flew off my racket and I played as well as I ever did. It was a shame that when I went back to playing with my mates that form was just a memory.
Assuming I know how to play the game (at least the basics even if I’m not skilled) and that I’m not weighing down a team (bridge, etc) I’d just go ahead and play for a bit. Some games like Scrabble rely a bit on luck so even if I lose, there’s still opportunity for me to drop a few good words and have some fun. If it turns out not to be fun for whatever reason, I can always excuse myself at the end of the game.
This is assuming that it’s the sort of game that plays fairly quickly. I’d rather not spend four hours getting trounced by the World Champions of Risk or Monopoly.
I’m not a particularly good chess player (I haven’t played competitively since I was 8 or so) but I’m many times better at it than most human beings. Depending on who I’m playing, I’ll turn the game into a lesson or try to play using unusual tactics to keep things interesting.
There’s a point at which the skill gap is so large that it’s essentially not actually a game anymore. Not everyone knows how to be a teacher or, more importantly, *cares *to be a teacher. I would never sit down with an internationally ranked chess player unless he made it quite explicitly clear that he understood that he had nothing to gain from it but the pleasure of my company. From a chess perspective, he would be very much wasting his time and would be better off studying old games, or possibly slamming his forehead into a brick wall.
Absolutely I would play; if you try hard and pay attention you can improve your own game very fast this way. A pity there are not more opportunities to play great players.
I would say poor sportsmanship is rare among good chess players IME.
The most likely cause of annoyance (without condoning it) might be if a person is playing on, and using a lot of thinking time, in a completely lost position.
I can accept that a beginner might want to see for themselves that a position is completely lost and play it out to mate. But it is probably better for everyone if once you’re down huge material with no counter-attack, to resign, ask your opponent where you went wrong, and get a rematch
The good news is that, played correctly and not in the “oh, we don’t want little Timmy to go out yet, do we?” manner that many of us grew up with, both Risk and Monopoly are games that take less than an hour to play.
The trick is actually following the rules as written and actually playing to win.
To be fair, the first hour of any Risk game I’ve been part of is trying to remember how to set-up and play Risk. Then you bumble through for another hour or so until people get bored at the slow pace of the game and give it up. Eighteen months later, you’re trying to remember how to play Risk again.
My nephew just got a Risk set last week or Easter and we played for a little bit. I noticed that have newer, streamlined rules and even an instant “end the game” card now.
I don’t mean to rag on you, but I actually enjoy both Monopoly and Risk, so it bugs me when people hold them up as example of “long slog games that people hate”, when usually it’s because people don’t play them correctly, and often because they only sortof know the rules. This isn’t to say they are without flaw: they both have the problem that one person can go out early and then have nothing to do while the other players finish the game, and the flaw that once one player gets a strong lead it becomes extraordinarily difficult to overcome so the endgame is a foregone conclusion.
In Monopoly, people will put money on free parking (which just injects extra cash into the game, making a losing player stick around longer) and they don’t play the auction rule, where if a player doesn’t buy a property it immediately goes into auction for someone to buy. But the biggest issue is, while not actually in conflict with the rules, is people that refuse to trade properties, which makes getting a Monopoly much more difficult.
In Risk, people either don’t pay attention to the trade-in rules, or the army generation rules in general, or they hole up in a corner of the map and refuse to attack.
Depends on what it is. If you can play bogey golf you can play with pretty much anybody and keep up, but chess with a grandmaster would be very annoying for both of you.
Heh. If you want to see how fast a game can go, watch me play chess against a ranked player.:o
That’s why I agree with** Johnny Bravo**. If a good player wants to go through every move, every card I play, explain why I was wrong, and let me have do-overs, that might be helpful. Of course, that’s not a game, that’s a lesson.
Otherwise, I’m going into the game with the idea that both of us will try our hardest to win. In that case, I know I’m going to lose, to lose badly, and to lose quickly. I’d play Gary Kasparov just to be able to say I played chess against Gary Kasparov, but that’s about all I’d get out of it.
No worries. After all, my meaning was that I doubt I’ve ever played Risk with anyone who knew how to play Risk (much less a group of such people) so I trust your experience when you say it doesn’t have to be a grind.
Should I ever be snowbound with the Swedish Bikini Risk Team, at least I know it won’t be a long game
NFW. I’ve always had bad experiences with smug sons of bitches, athough now that I think about it, it’ mostly male phenomenon. I’ve played with women who were vastly better than me at games, and they just don’t pull the asshole behavior (some) males do.
I remember having a Doper over my house once and I offered to play Super Smash Brothers against him. Despite me telling him I wasn’t very good and that I didn’t play often, and just for fun, he proceeded to thoroughly trounce me and then mock me for days afterward. That was years ago and I still roll my eyes when I think of it.
On the other hand I regularly play (Chinese) Mah-Jongg with a lady who is amazingly good and she considers herself a mentor.
I am not naturally competitive - I like to play for fun. So yeah, I would not play with any professional men unless I saw that they were good sports first.
When I first snagged a managerial job in a male-dominated industry, I attended my fair share of golf outings (aka male executive bonding sessions). Although I’m a lifelong athlete, I’d never golfed while my colleagues all golfed regularly and some were really excellent players. It didn’t take me long to discover that, unskilled as I was in general with the game, I had one thing to offer. I’m a slam dunk putter. It comes naturally to me. I have no idea why. It wasn’t long before my frustrated and irritated foursome partners who’d been stuck with me caught on to this and we struck a bargain. Someone would tee off for me and get the ball on the green, then I would putt it. In return, I’d take over at the putting stage for any other player who wasn’t good at it.
I’m still a low average golf player in general, but I found my strength and made it work for me.
I can’t imagine I could give any real chess expert an interesting game. But if circumstances led me to a situation where I had to play one, I’d pepper him/her with questions and at least try to learn something from the experience.
