Tuesday 12 June 2012

Thoughts on match 2

Another very close game.

I felt that overall my unwillingness to roll unnecessary dice really paid off. I made two dodges in total all game (both at the end of a turn where it didn't matter if I fell over), and did not make any one die blocks.

There were actually very few rolls where I didn't have a reroll available and it would have mattered if I had failed. I can't think of a single one offhand. In contrast my opponent was let down badly by the dice, but these tended to be situations where either he didn't have a reroll (4+ pickup rolls in particular), or a particularly unlikely set of dice were required. There were only a couple of occasions I think when he was genuinely unlucky. I was tearing my hair out at one stage with the number of one die blocks that he was getting away with, but fortunately my armour held up.

The game started very well for me, with a short kick and the Norse player making his only real mistake by allowing me to blitz a hole through the middle. This gave me a dream start, basically, and put all the pressure on my opponent in the rest of the game - it allowed me to sit back and be patient for the following 12 turns. If I hadn't scored on my first drive I would have had to have been much more aggressive in the second half and taken many more risks.

Towards the end of the match my inexperience against human opponents began to show - the AI would never have taken the risks the Norse player took in switching the point of attack at the end of the game and by taking this risk the player gave himself a relatively unlikely chance to score an equaliser in turn 15 - 5+ pickup, 5+ pass (with reroll), 4+ catch, 2+ GFI with a team reroll available would have done the job. I have just worked this out using probability trees and it comes to a worryingly large 17.7% chance of success. I could have reduced this substantially by putting a tackle zone on the potential receiver, and it nearly cost me the win in the end.

I must be careful to stay patient and emphasis field position when defending even at the expense of getting casualties. I nearly lost position there at the end.

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