"Creature Of Habit"
Introduction
I am not the most adventurous of human beings. I tend to do the same things, day in, day out. In fact, the closest I get to the wild side of life is having crumpets for breakfast instead of toast. I know, what a true enigma I am. I mention this because it even affects the way I play Yahtzee. You see, I tend to be a "safe" player. I'm methodical and analytical and there is usually very little change in my approach. I don't often go out on a limb chasing Yahtzees, Four Of A Kinds or Large Straights, y'know, the big hitters. No, I tend to let those opportunities present themselves and concentrate on other, more achievable scores in the meantime. Trouble is, sometimes those opportunities don't always present themselves. This is, of course due to the fact that dice are dice and they are random by their very nature. But, is it within my power to affect the regularity of getting the big scores? Is my careful approach to the game too careful? Is it holding me back? Limiting my final score? So, I guess the real question is, should I be sticking my neck out a bit more and start chasing the heavy hitters? Approaching the board with a bit more gusto than I'm used to.
Well, being the naturally curious kind of bloke that I am, I decided there was only one way to find out. I was going to have to test my theory.
Method
So, this is not going to be some super long winded experiment that goes on for weeks on end. It's a small exercise to satisfy my own curiosity and to hopefully teach you something, or at the very least, entertain you in some form or another. The way it's going to work is I'm going to play ten games playing in my old style, I'll call it "Reserved Play" for want of a better name, then I'll play ten games where I make more adventurous decisions than I normally would, I'll call this "Adventurous play". I will make a note of all final scores, take an average of each category and see which approach is the best. No, not the most scientific, but I think it will give us a good indication as to which approach is more beneficial. If the difference is negligible, I may up the amount of games to twenty, just to make sure. As a prediction, I would say, that if there is a one hundred point advantage for either approach, then that is the approach that is best to proceed with. Like I said, this is not by any means scientific, I just thought it would be interesting. An experiment on a much larger scale with a substantially bigger sample size than I am prepared to undertake would be required if I was to truly nail my colours to the mast and say for sure which approach is the best.
Finally, before we proceed, should "Adventurous Play" storm the experiment, what exactly am I going to do with that information? Does that mean I will abandon my trusty safe and steady approach? I'd be a fool not to wouldn't I? Well, we'll see, I'm a creature of habit after all, right? Habits can be hard to break. Why don't we see where the data takes us?
Results
Reserved Play Results
• Game #1 - 297
• Game #2 - 224
• Game #3 - 288
• Game #4 - 312
• Game #5 - 153
• Game #6 - 271
• Game #7 - 313
• Game #8 - 206
• Game #9 - 201
• Game #10 - 261
Average Score - 252.6
Adventurous Play Results
• Game #1 - 175
• Game #2 - 250
• Game #3 - 226
• Game #4 - 291
• Game #5 - 192
• Game #6 - 195
• Game #7 - 209
• Game #8 - 136
• Game #9 - 189
• Game #10 - 143
Average Score - 200.6
Observations
Reserved Play
My first round of ten games were played in my usual, careful, style. As predicted, I felt right at home with this approach, and why wouldn't I? I have been playing this way since the very beginning, ever since I popped my dice cherry, it felt like getting wrapped up in a big thick duvet on a winter's day with a hooker named Brandi; very, very familiar. And it has to be said, it showed. I got six Yahtzees out of ten games (one Yahtzee per game), I got eight Large Straights out of ten games and ten Full Houses out of ten games. I'm not going to list everything I got, but I think it gives you an idea that I didn't do too bad. My average score came in at 252.6. A smidgen over my overall average. I have to say I wasn't really expecting these results. I have been on a rather shitty run as of late, so I have to admit that six Yahtzees in just ten games was a welcome, if slightly surprising, development. But that's how it goes when you're rolling them bones, and I certainly wasn't complaining!
Adventurous Play
If I was playing with all the style and aplomb that you are used to seeing with me (yeah, right), then it certainly wasn't the case when I switched up my approach. As it turned out out, I ended up peforming like an Oompa Loompa competing in the High Jump. Now, to be clear, in the ten games I played, I didn't set out to make out and out reckless decisions, far from it, but I was looking to be be a bit more aggressive in my game and go for scores I might not usually go for. Immediately it felt wrong. A bit like when you went back to school after the summer holidays and you've completely forgotten how to write (or was that just me?). Even when I was making just the slightest alterations to my approach, it felt like I was pushing my luck to it's limits, and the results reflected the way I felt. I got three measly Yahtzees in ten games (one Yahtzee per game), six Large Straights out of ten games and seven Full Houses out of ten games. A marked difference. A surprising difference actually. My average was 200.6, a whole one fifth less than the previous ten games. A discrepancy far greater than I had anticipated.
Conclusion
If I'm honest, I didn't expect there to be a right lot in this silly experiment of mine, so much so that I even wondered if it was worth doing at all, but it actually threw up some pretty valuable information. For me at least. In the interest of transparency, I could have overdone it in terms of my "adventurousness", after all, it's not my style of play. So the results could be somewhat unintentionally skewed. Perhaps I need to consult with my fellow competitors that adopt this more aggressive approach a bit more than I do and figure out what I might have been doing wrong. It was only a theory after all. But, for now at least, the data suggests that I'm definitely better off sticking with what I know. And for clarity, I came to this experiment with genuine interest to see if there was something I was missing when it came to the gameplay of Yahtzee, so, to skew the results intentionally to "prove myself correct" would be a worse act of self sabotage since Kurt Cobain loaded his gun. I may return to this experiment much later, once I have gathered the necessary information from the necessary people and I would be sure to give myself a much greater sample size. But for now, I have to say, I feel vindicated in my softly softly catchy monkey approach.
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