I practiced quite a bit as a youngster and got to the level of county player but never practiced enough to go pro but the raw talent was probably there.
I don’t really play now but I have a board up in my garage and now and then I’ll put a meditative hour in chucking the arrows and It doesn’t take me too long to get back to regular 180’s and 12 dart 501 games with triple digit checkouts.
I refuse to leave the board until I’ve thrown an aesthetically pleasing 180, i.e. not having one dart sticking out at a silly angle
In addition to the excellent post above, I always play 2 or 3 cards ahead of what’s on the table, much like a chess master plans his moves well ahead of actually playing them. Also, I have found the difference between a good and really good player is how they play the crib cards. Good players play the 4 best cards, the rest go in the crib. A really good player plays the 4 card hand and the crib. I will break up a good hand and play the chance of an even better crib.
Aa - with or without the apostrophe - is of course an English word. It is in every dictionary, not just the Scrabble one. Hell, I knew that word when I was eight years old; it was in my kid’s encyclopedia. English does borrow words from other languages; saying “aa” isn’t a word makes as much sense as saying “rodeo” or “kindergarten” aren’t English words.
In that case I’m not good. Assuming you’re gathering ten random men who actually play golf, the odds are excellent at lest one or more will kick my ass.
Someone with a 5 handicap, like Doyle, will probably be the best in a group of ten random recreational golfers. Not guaranteed, but probably. 5 is really very good; he’s not making a lot of mistakes.
It seems to me that as the skill of the players goes up, the chance of a high-scoring crib would go down. You may throw cards into your crib are likely to score, but your opponent is going to try equally hard to not help your crib. If I even think of throwing a 5 into my opponent’s crib my grandfather will come back from the grave to yell at me.
None, really. At various times was pretty decent at what I’d consider local amateur level at darts, golf, MMA, 16" softball, roleplayer power forward at hoops (no dribble/shot, but rebound/box-out/set picks). Lettered in golf and track in HS. But I was always extremely aware that there were many MANY folk much better than me at every level.
Used to be pretty darned good at pinball, especially 8-ball and Power Play, but never tournament level.
I’m sure there must be situations in which throwing a 5 into the crib would be a smart play. For example, end of game, and say you’re a dozen points or so short of 121 and are dealt 5-7-7-8-9-K. And you’re tied. Throw away that 5-K. You get to count first and win. Similarly, if you’re 20-ish points behind and your opponent is within, say, a dozen of the finish line, you’re only hope is pretty much to toss that 5-K and pray for a double run with another 7,8, or 9. Otherwise, after your crib count leaves you short, your opponent effectively gets to count three hands before you get to score yours, so you pretty much have to go all-in to even have a shot of beating them.
The order in which hands are scored and the strategy behind how to pace the game becomes very important towards the endgame. Sometimes you’ll want to speed up the scoring and tease opponents into making runs during peg play; other times you want to slow down scoring based on who has the crib and what your respective positions are on the board. It’s helpful to know that the dealer usually pegs about 3-4 points per hand, while the pone pegs 2, on average. All in all, dealer gets about 16 points on an average hand, opponent 10 (this includes pegging and cards in hand and crib.) Knowing these sorts of numbers helps with endgame strategy.
Yes, as the skill level of the opponents go up, these sorts of things get accounted four, and you’re unlikely to see opponents throw touching middle cards that could lead to big point runs like “6-7” into the crib unless they have a real good reason to do so. Sometimes maximizing in-hand points is the best play; sometimes minimizing the opponent’s damage is the best play, your own hand be damned. It really depends on the state of the game and where everyone is on the board.
Star Raiders, especially for the 5200. I loved that game as a kid and used to play it all the time. I got to where I would go destroy my own bases to make it more difficult.
Montezuma’s Revenge, another game I used to play quite a bit. The last level, that repeated, was totally in the dark and I never had much of a problem getting through it.
I’m a pretty good swimmer, I would think that if you took a random group of 10 people I’d beat them all. I did an auquabike last year and my swim would have put me in the top 10% of all the other people in the triathlon. I know I skipped the run but I would have done the same time if I was doing the run as well.
That’s impressive. That game frustrated the crap out of me, but was one of the smoothest platformers for the C64. The fact that it was basically developed by a 16-year-old kid is amazing. I never got anywhere near close to finishing – or getting to the last level, that is, as there is no real end – of the game. Only recently did I discover just how big the map is. I’m lucky if I covered a quarter of it.
Your post does remind me, though, Karate Champ (the Player vs Player. edition, not the one that takes place in a dojo, but the common US one where the first level starts on the docks, the second is a Japanese courtyard with Mt. Fuji in the background, the third is a field, etc.) I still have all those two-joystick combinations engrained in my muscle memory. I was in fourth and fifth grades when I played the shit out of this game, and I’d be able to play about a half hour to forty minutes on a single quarter. This was also back in the day when crowds would form around you when you were playing as you got to higher and higher levels. That was the only video game I’d ever been that good at. That said, I’d only finished just over half the game. After the 12th level, you start again at the first level with increased difficulty (basically, the computer comes at you a 2x speed, while you remain your usual speed). I could only get to the 14th level (maybe 15th). The game actually does end after 24 levels. The problem is, there’s just no way to practice the higher difficulty levels on their own. You have to spend a half hour or so to get to that point, only to get your ass kicked in a minute the first few times until you get a sense of the pace. After about a half dozen times, I just didn’t care anymore, as I had seen all the different backgrounds (which was my motivation in playing the game over and over. I’ve never been one to play for points, but rather to see new levels.)
I’m a decent cyclist, compared to the man on the street - race a lot of different disciplines, cyclocross, mountain bike long, enduro, time trials etc. All for fun, roll in at the back for enduro, mid-field for cyclocross, top quarter for the longer MTB stuff. Have got a few 2nd and 3rds in mountain bike orienteering - much smaller fields and skillful map work can significantly close the gap to stronger riders.
I think anyone healthy could get to a good standard at cycling if they wanted, but the technical skills of mountain biking are hard to come by if you start late.
You look at the top riders and it’s like a logarithmic progression. Couple of lads in our club can annihilate me and win regional races. At the nationals, they then get destroyed by the national-level riders, who in turn would get a pummelling if they went over to Belgium and took on the top cyclocross pros there. And these national level-riders (UK) would be struggling to make a living from the sport, which makes it deeply impressive that they are as strong as they are.
That’s an interesting definition. Could someone far better at math than I calculate what that means in terms of where you would need to be ranked for it to be probable that you would be the best of ten randomly drawn players?
To illustrate, if you were 90th percentile - 10th best out of 100 - what are the chances that you would be the best player from 10 drawn randomly? What if you were 9th? 8th? At what number does the probability of your being the best exceed 0.5?
In terms of master points won this year, I am in the 97.5 percentile in the US at bridge.
I thought checkers, at least by official rules, always forced jumps. I can’t remember ever playing anyone who didn’t use forced jumps–that’s like part of the whole strategy of checkers.
I never really had many games like that when I was a kid. I had a couple of Infocom games and the King’s Quest games but that was it really. Montezuma’s Revenge just became one of the few I could play all the time so I did.
I forgot I am pretty good at the arcade version of Mortal Kombat. I own one now though don’t play it very often. I won my college tournament a time or two. Outside of those games I was never very good at any other games. I have a hard time playing the majority of the Playstation games and I’ve stopped playing them recently.
I’d put myself as ‘good’ in tennis and soccer, playing on college teams and high-level amateur. I was a speedy little cuss in my day, pretty much always the fastest runner on the field at any time. I can still recall only a handful of people that would outrun me on the field. Old knees and ankles now
At an old MMO flight sim, Warbirds, I was high-tier against most other players. I could rope-a-dope victims all day in my ME-109 without dying, only returning for ammo reloads
