Freakonomics Radio - 247. How to Win Games and Beat People

Episode Date: May 12, 2016

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.

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. People say, oh, it's the taking part that counts. It's the battle cry of the loser. 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. We learn this emotional pleasure that comes from taking control.

It's an activity that seems to be eternal and universal. We do know that board games are just about as old as civilization itself and human beings. It's an activity that is inherently communal. They're here four nights a week playing this card game that's been around since I was a kid. 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. Hot damn! Woo-hoo! Yeah! From WNYC Studios, this is Freakonomics Radio,

the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen 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. So Backgammon is a great example of a game that has ancient roots, in this case Greek. And that is? Mary Pilon, the author of The Monopolis, a book about the secret history of the board game Monopoly. Pilon knows the history of other games as well. Okay. So Senate goes back to Egypt. Egypt.

Around 3500 BC, Go and Liubo, which are Chinese games, also go back to the earliest known civilization. Urb, 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. Gameplaying 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. 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. In the U.S., ancient games were modernized, new ones were invented, and history itself conspired to create demand. So first of all, you have electric lighting. Now you could play games at night. Also, child labor was going out of fashion. 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. Fast forward now a few more generations. 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. 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 cafe in Greenwich Village called The Uncommons.

With his wife, Jenny Chin, and a friend, they are playing a game called Takenoko. Takenoko. It is a map-building, bamboo-growing, panda-eating board game. Jenny, I will slay you. I just started this. Jenny, I will slay you. I just started this game and I will slay you. Let's see about that. We'll see. What we're going to find out is what we're going to find out.

It's not a competition and it's not really a group work thing. We're just... We're each helping to grow a farm, but we're also taking advantage of what they've built and taking it from them. It's kind of similar to Settlers of Catan. Yeah, you're building the same map, but you have your own agenda. It was horrible.

Greg May is the founder of The Uncommons. 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. So that's what he started, with a collection of nearly 1,000 board games. 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 and growth in games that weren't around when I was a kid. I've designed Bad Medicine, which is a party game where the players are all pharmaceutical companies making horrible drugs. That's Gil Hova. He is a board game designer and publisher who lives in Jersey City. 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.

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. 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 U.S. 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 games. Whatever the case, the instinct to play some kind of game with some kind of opponent is extraordinarily common and long-lived. Just about every civilization with dates that go way, way, way, way, way back, they were playing games. Mary Pilon again. 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 mimicked the world that was around them and have warfare as a theme, or religion as 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. Palan herself is a gamer. 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. Some people, like 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. Now I'd like you to meet Tom Whipple. We'll get to his CV shortly. I have an early memory from when I was nine or ten 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 the i And that sort of taught me that, you know, 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.

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. 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 and are you or have you ever been a scientist yourself 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 um 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. And you want them to talk to you like an idiot. I want them to talk to me like an idiot, particularly if I'm at CERN or somewhere like that. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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. 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? I mean, yes, you've described sort of a meta game theory problem. It's a little 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. 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. 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 aren't trying to get this as high as possible. And instead of taking ones from the outside,

there's 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 any more. Well, what she'd do is she'd pinch the ones on the outside, the one on the left and 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. For the beloved sport of stone skipping, also known as stone skimming, Whipple spoke with a guy called Kurt Steiner, who had a relatively simple goal in life. 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 this there are angles velocities and spins are all based upon a perfectly spherical stone in a frictionless environment that does all 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 skims. And does that make him something like a world champion? 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 his whole... 30 degrees down or up? 30 degrees angle to the horizontal. What would look like straight into the water. 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 it'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. 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? I'm absolutely up for that. 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. That's fine. I mean, this slightly fills me with dread because it makes it all the more

embarrassing when I lose. 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 one in three record might make me look a little bit like a hero. 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. 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? 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. Already blaming with the chance. I've got to get the excuses in early, yeah. Coming up on Freakonomics Radio, I quickly accomplish my first goal, getting in Tom Whipple's head. You've got nothing to lose in this. It's me who's got the entire reputation in my publishing future. But soon, he recaptures the psychological high ground.

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. And we have to work out some ground rules for rock, paper, scissors. because I'm your friend, so I think you're just trying to gain my trust so that you can lie. And we have to work out some ground rules for rock, paper, scissors. It sounds like what baboons do with their bottoms, doesn't it? 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. I thought that we could begin with Connect Four. Does that work with you? Yeah. 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.

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 all out to win. So, no, I understand. Well said. Yeah, okay. So I've got here the executive producer of Freakonomics Radio, Irva Gunja.

Irva, can you just say hello? Hello. And Irva, is there anything you can say in a sentence or two that you do want to take a pledge of honesty as a moderator referee? 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. 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. Okay. And, Tom, do you have somebody there with you in London? Yeah. I have if Molly will say hello. Hi. Hi, Molly.

So, Tom, you apparently know how to win at this every time, presuming you go first, I understand, correct? 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. So I guess I should let you go first then.

You go first and then I've got something more to blame. OK, you want to play yellow or red? I'll play yellow. 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. I will go directly on top of you with my yellow. All right, so I have only two options, I think sensible options, but maybe you've got me overthinking my Connect Four strategy. I think you may be overthinking. I'm very pleased that I phased you out already. You've totally psyched me out. You're in my head. I will drop what I think is an obvious one, column three,

down all the way to the bottom to row A. So I'll put mine down in column five. 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 three in a row looks good, even though I know you'll block me. All right, so I'm going to go for B3. Okay.

Yep. Then, oh, no! I don't think we're there yet. Oh, but just the... I love the panic in your voice just already. Yeah, just so you know, that was not fake panic. That was real panic. Well, you've got nothing to lose in this.

It's me who's got the entire reputation of my publishing future. Not to instill you with more fear. Oh, great. Molly, come on. But what I found really interesting was that this was a tactic used by Beyonce on Kanye West in Connect Four. And I mean, we're on the side of Beyonce here is all I know. I'm Kanye then? Oh, yeah.

Yeah, I think you're Kanye. Yeah, you're Kanye. Who won? Well, Beyonce. Did she go first? I think you've heard. Yeah, you're Kanye. Who won? Well, Beyonce. Did she go first? I think you've heard of the Fischer-Spaski chess match. I have. This was the equivalent in Connect Four.

It was, at least according to Showbiz Press, and if you can't believe the Showbiz Press, then where are we in the world? Kanye West, Jay-Z, and Beyonce were backstage in 2009. And what do the three biggest names in world music do in the backstage? Well, they had a Connect Four tournament. And Kanye West, who describes himself in his music as God's vessel, lost 8-1 to Beyonce. Oh, that's an argument for atheism right there.

She is indeed my inspiration for this game. Wow. So you're not channeling Mathematician, you're channeling Beyoncé, which is a much more formidable force. Exactly, yeah. I mean, you don't argue with Beyoncé Knowles. Our Connect 4 match went on and on for the next 20 minutes.

I'm going to go 4C. I am going to go to block off your potential three in a row on the bottom. 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. That three in a row worries me quite a lot. Question. Has the publisher already written you the check?

The check has come and gone and been spent. So we're all right. We're all right. Until we were down to an inevitable finish. All the slots have been filled except for column two. It is now Whipple's turn, and he will be forced to play 2B. It's doom, isn't it? At least you're losing with humor.

And I really only have one move, and it happens to be a winning move. And are you going to claim the five in the row or the four in the row diagonally that gives you? I am going to claim connect nine. It's game Dubner. Oh dear, it's not good for Blighty. Tom, plainly, I stumbled into a lucky progression there and happened to beat you.

Well, that's very sweet for you to say I stumbled, but what I will say in my defense, in some senses senses what we just had is the classic connect four games 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 the German word Zugzwang. Have you come across this? I haven't.

I like it. The Germans have a word for everything. And it's not surprising that maybe in the milieu of 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. Oh, I do. I Zugzwang every day. I have to say, I'm glad to know there's a

word for it. Well, there you go. So that's that's it. 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 and he says that 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 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 if

i did 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 that's why all right now let's um shall we disgorge our checkers because that's always always been, to me, the most fun part of the game. Yeah, yeah, here they go. I'm going to have to bow out. I'm really sorry. I've got to go. That's okay, Molly.

It's our fault. Thanks very much, Molly. Thank you very much. No, it was really lovely. It was really good fun. Okay. Good luck with the next one. Thank you very much.

Not that apparently you need it. 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. So all I need to know is how many letters. Okay, and I'll tell you there are four letters.

Now tell me immediately, is that a good thing to go short or bad? Oh yeah, it's a very good thing to go short. All right, go for it. So A. That is a miss. Nine guesses remain. That is a miss. I'm going to go down the vowels on this, but you don't always. So I'm going to go E. That is a miss. Nine guesses remain. That is a miss. I'm going to go down the vowels on this, but you don't always. So I'm going to go E.

That is a miss. Eight guesses remain. Oh, you have done something with a Y or something, haven't you? Or have I? Exactly. Well, I can do nothing but stick to my strategy. So I'm going to go for an O. That is a hit. You've got an O in the second spot, four letters. The second letter is an O. 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. Beautiful guess. That is a miss. That is a miss. Damn. Seven guesses remain. Seven guesses remain. We don't even have the gallows built yet, but soon we get to your body.

I'm going to go for an S. It's a negatory, Batman. The gallows are complete. The gallows are complete. Oh, God, you're marching me towards my doom. I am going to go for an R. Another miss. Five guesses remain.

If I wanted to march you toward your doom, I'd just challenge you to another game of Connect Four, no offense. 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 gone for something like a J. The first letter is a J. So you have a J, the second letter is an O, and two blanks.

Five guesses left. Well, I am going to go for... That's a good question. See, I am going to go four. That's a good question. See, now I'm looking at what words actually work. I can't imagine there are that many four-letter words starting with J-O, right? Well, this is completely sort of, so I'm thinking jowl. And that's Game Whipple.

Beautifully done. Tom Whipple. Oh, you're just over-praising after the Connect 4 disaster. I'm not. I'm really impressed. Jowl, I thought it was a good word. Jowl is a really good word. 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 guesser's perspective, you had a strategy that happened to work beautifully there. Could I learn that strategy as well pretty quickly? Quite boringly, there's a table in my book, which got the first letter on the board. For this, I should say, I spoke to Nick Berry, who's a data scientist at Facebook who looks into these things in his 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 you think that oh 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 9th century. There was a guy who went through the Koran and wrote down every 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 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 if he knew that a particular letter popped up more and he'd a big enough corpus of data to decode he could begin to work out which letters were which so he 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. 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 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 someone 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 words, you're left with E-S for sugar, I-A-R-N. So that's the optimal kind of first guessing

streak, yes? 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 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. Once you land the first letter, then you reassess the kind of word that you're thinking about or no? 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 just decided to go J. So I went a bit off-piste there. All right, that was very stressful, though. That was fun. Can we play another?

I'm sweating. Yeah. So I've got a three-letter one up on my end of things. 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. Well, exactly.

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?

Or I could have just done cat because I just thought you'd think this way. Ah, once again, you're deep inside my head. I would like to call Y. Y is not on it. Y is a miss. Nine guesses remain.

O. O is not in it. Dubner has eight guesses left. A. A is the second letter. 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. I've forgotten how many switcheroos we're on me. Either that or you thought you were pulling the double switcheroo because A is the first letter in the optimal calling order. I've forgotten how many switcheroos we're on now.

Now I think it calls for some psychoanalysis. So what'd you have for breakfast today, Tom? I had toast and bagels. Was there jam on your toast? I couldn't imagine where you're going. Yes, there was lashings of jam on my toast. I'm not familiar with the word lashings, but I'm focusing on the jam. Do you have pets at home? I have pet tortoises. But no feline-type pets? No. How do you feel about feline-type pets?

I'm ambivalent towards feline-type pets. C. That's the first one. C. That's the first one. T. I think that would be the one I was going for. I think a treble switcheroo on telling you it was cat. The minute you said you were ambivalent, can I tell you why? Nobody's

ambivalent about cats. You either love cats or you hate cats. You're right. You've got my tell. You've got my tell. 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. How about we play Battleship?

Let's do Battleship. Is there a large advantage to going first? I don't think anyone's particularly done the maths on it, but I don't think it's huge. All right, Tom, you can go first then. Okay, I'm going to stick it right in the middle at E5. And that is a hit. Congratulations.

Thank you very much. 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. So I'll say E6.

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. E4 sadly is a miss. H4, sadly, is a miss.

Okay. H2. H2 is a miss. Going to work around D5. D5 would be a Mississippi. I will next choose I10. I10 is also a miss. Now, you did lay ships down on the board, correct?

Rather, you have a photograph to prove it. E6. That would be a hit. So Whipple has two hits, Dubner has none. I don't know if that was necessary here, but it lowered my self-esteem here. B1. B1 is a miss. Now the question is whether with E7 I will have sunk your battleship.

Hit. Oh, that's a big one. That's three hits, no ship sunk. A8. A8 is, I'm sorry to say, a miss. Not that sorry. I'm not that sorry at all. Delighted.

Okay, E8. Hit and sunk. 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.

Yeah. Is that a false sense of solace? 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 really not a single way in which this relates to real battleships. J3. J3 is a miss.

H7. H7 would be a miss. Okay. Tom, close your ears for a minute. They're closed. Dear listener, his H7 was disastrously close to two ships. Thank God. C10. Again, a miss. H5. Interesting choice. It is, however, also a miss. Hey, Tom, close your ears for 35 seconds or so. 35 seconds. Okay, it's coming off. Dear listener, that was unbelievably close. Again, thank God.

Hey, Tom? Yeah? 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 going to stick with it for a little longer. And I'll say F1. F1 is a miss.

F5. F5 is a miss. J7. J7 is a miss. Miss. So I've got to 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 got to 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 the mother load.

Would the quadrant include H8? It would not. Again, you did put ships on the board, yes? There are ships, there are photographs to prove it. They're just using their British pluck to evade your artillery. F8. Hit and sunk. You've 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 going to beat me anyway. I'm worried about my strategy now. Do you understand why I'm worried besides the fact that I'm behind? Is it because you've been putting ships next to each other? Hmm. Yes.

Thinking that I would confound me with it. Confound you. But if indeed I've done that consistently, then the confounding will come to a crashing halt. 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. I appreciate your thinking of me as strategically as that and as nastily as that. 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. You've got rid of my most valuable ship. right well that's something so uh people who play this competitively which are vanishingly few um would not generally put many ships on the outside of the board why's that 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 the situation. And for exactly the same reason, 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 um 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 um because you know if people know 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.

So it sounds as though you're saying that the, your planting strategy, you're setting up ship strategy is to place them what seems to be randomly. Yeah. While avoiding the edges. 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. Yeah, yeah, no, that makes sense.

That's a kind of, right, an 80-20-ish kind of rule. Okay. I'm going to take a punt on you having some mad psychology with this, and I'm going to go for I-9. Oh, no! That was a very good hit. Very good hit. Very good hit. Tom Whipple.

Excellent. Well? Well, you've won. Well, we're not there yet. No, no, no, I can't, because mathematically... No, no, I've won. You're right. All right, let me try to at least find your battleship, because that is the name of the game. So I will call it

G9. G9 is a hit. There we go. Well, it's an honorable 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. I'm so shamefully embarrassed by my horrible play here, but hopefully it can help another player win another day. Yeah, it's demonstrated a point.

You're a cautionary tale in Battleship. It was time for our final game of the point. You're a cautionary tale in Battleship. 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, 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. A win for Tom. A win for Tom, and I told the truth. Yeah, okay. One, two, three, present. Paper.

Scissors. Scissors cuts paper. That is a win for Steven. One, two, three, present. Rock. Scissors. Rock crushes scissors, and that is a win for Stephen. One, two, three, present. Rock. Scissors. Rock crushes scissors, and that is a win for Tom. So that is two, one, Tom.

One, two, three, present. Paper. Scissors. Scissors cuts paper. That is a win for Dubner. So it's two all. Two all. One, two, three, present. Rock.

Scissors. Rock crushes scissors. That is a takeaway for Whipple. That is three, two, three, present. Rock. Scissors. Rock crushes scissors. That is a takeaway for Whipple. That is three, two, Whipple. 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. Okay. Rock crushes scissors. That is a win for Whipple. It is now 4-2. 1-2-3 present. Paper. Rock.

Paper covers rock. That is a win for Whipple. It is 5-2 Whipple. 1-2-3 present. Scissors. Rock. Rock crushes scissors. That is a win for Dubner.

It is 5-3 Whipple. 1-2-3 present. Paper. Paper. That's a draw. That's a draw. 1-2 three, present. Paper. Paper. That's a draw. That's a draw. One, two, three, present. Paper. Paper. That's a draw. One,

two, three, present. Paper. Rock. Ah, well done. That was a beautiful... Well, that was really tense. That was just good for the game. 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. 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, and then they were going to look for strategies or look for ticks, the non-randomness that could be exploited. And the ones they found is sort of almost embarrassingly

as 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 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 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 giving you an edge. I mean, I don't think it's, you know, there's a huge element of chance, and 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. So I assume that according to your master 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. 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 least used statistically of all of them. Scissors are the least, I assume that rock is the most? 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. 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. 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 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 won. And, you know, who's the real loser? Coming up next week on Freakonomics Radio, our month of self-improvement concludes with a person whose entire life is dedicated to self-improvement. My name is Tim Ferriss. I am a human guinea pig and professional dilettante.

Tim Ferriss, charlatan or wizard? The man behind The 4-Hour Workweek and other 4-hour books tells us everything he knows about self-improvement. Good way to trap your monkey mind on paper so it doesn't distract you and sabotage you for the rest of the day. And his obsessions. It's one of these fixations that I've not been able to get rid of. You are a weird dude. That's next of these fixations that I've not been able to get rid of.

You are a weird dude. That's next time on Freakonomics Radio. Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC Studios and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Irva Gunja. Our staff also includes Jay Cowett, Merit Jacob, Christopher Wirth, Greg Rosalski, Kasia Mihailovic, 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. Is that a surrender? This is not a surrender. No, no, no, no. Britannia will still rule the waves. Bye.