When one plays the same moves as one's opponent chooses in the other game of the set, I think this is often referred to as mirroring the other player's moves. When drawn sets resulted in no rating change, this was annoying, but not a concern in terms of rating points loss. When each game was rated individually, this was perhaps still annoying but possibly a bit less so than now. In standard Pente variants, there are a somewhat limited number of decent openings, so having two games in which the first several stones are the same in paired or back to back games isn't terribly unusual. But in swap games, where there are millions of decent opening proposals, even leaving out poor proposals and reflected positions (16 billion + four stone openings to choose among!)...? I think it's lame to mirror in a set of a D game, personally. If someone did this against me, I might choose not to play them again or if I did decide to play them perhaps only by both players sending moves to a referee in advance of making those moves. In the set itself, I would try to play behind their moves if they chose the same opening proposal as I did. Or I'd let them copy my moves until we reached a pivotal and complex part of the game where I knew there were two or more comp!ex lines and decide which one I wanted to play as which color... If I ended up in the ahead position in play, I'd likely look further ahead for an unlikely move with a complex winning line; a line which my opponent would likely not be able to see and would figure I'd just played a losing move, so s/he would pick a more reasonable looking move. Then, I'd attempt to win both games after their divergence from my unlikely move...
Message was edited by: watsu at Jun 1, 2020, 4:28 PM
Retired from TB Pente, but still playing live games & exploring variants like D, poof and boat
Make him/her pay to see my next move: Also, if I were only playing a little bit ahead of my opponent and the game was in early stages, I might compare our weekend days and vacation hours and see whether or not by some creative manipulation of when my weekend days occurred I might be able to get my opponent using vacation hours in order to see my next move. Who knows, I might even decide to support rainwolf by buying some extra vacation days... just depends on how much I didn't want to draw a set by mirroring, I suppose.
