How To Win Games And Beat People Part 5

Chicken wings Target: 182 in 30 minutes One of the more technical disciplines, this has several successful attack strategies and there are many videos online detailing different techniques.

i) Meat umbrella. "I push it down, it forms an upside-down umbrella, and I pop it in."ii) Wishboning. Put whole wing in mouth, while holding the end of the small and large bone.

Break them apart and pull, sucking the flesh as the bone leaves.

iii) Cl.u.s.ter targeting. "Like a cannibalistic chicken, I look for the meaty parts, and I just peck at them."QUIZZES/TRIVIAL PURSUITWHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT?

I say "Norma Jean Mortenson," you say "Marilyn Monroe." I say "ice pick in Mexico City," you say "Trotsky." 2.71828? e. Lima? Peru. And, the clincher: what if I say "pub"? If your answer is "arena of gladiatorial combat for proving one's social supremacy through the recall of unusual facts,"

congratulations-you're a quizzer. If you answer instead, "pleasant social place to meet friends, drink, and gossip," please, please just don't talk during the music round.

HOW DO YOU PLAY?.

Choose a team name that starts off as mildly amusing and becomes progressively less so as the evening progresses. "Let's Get Quizzical" works very well, as does-for those quizzes in which the quizmaster reads the score out each round-"I lost my virginity at the age of . . ."

HOW DOES IT END?.

Hopefully, after the final round, with the quizmaster at least admitting to having been past the age of consent.

a.n.a.lYSIS.

"There is this strange idea," says Olav Bjortomt, "that quiz knowledge is innate." It isn't. "It takes hard work. Dr. Johnson said a friends.h.i.+p is in a constant state of repair; the same is true for general knowledge."

For Olav, member of the England quiz team and 2014 European Quizzing champion, this constant repair requires constant vigilance. "I scan adverts on the London Underground to see what's out."

Most recently, that included an ad for the film of the book Fifty Shades of Grey. "So I thought, 'What is the real name of E. L. James? Who played Christian Grey?' There are always lots of related facts."

As well as ads, every day he looks through newspapers for possible questions. "Quizzers know what to learn. I am very good at recognizing proper nouns when I read the newspaper." Sometimes, it just requires spotting the likely questions. "You hear facts instantly and know they are quiz questions.

Like, Harper Lee has a sequel out to To Kill a Mockingbird, what is it? That's a quiz fact." Years ago, he set a quiz and put in, "?'What is Lady Gaga's real name?' Now I hear that in quizzes around the country." That is another quiz fact.

Other times, though, succeeding at quizzing involves active learning. He knows all the Shakespeare plays, obviously, but he also has to have a pa.s.sing knowledge of the other Elizabethan playwrights.

"With Ford, you have to know 'Tis Pity She' s a Wh.o.r.e. With the others you learn the most famous play and one other." He takes a similar approach elsewhere. "I learn a couple of moons of Jupiter, a couple of chancellors of Germany. I can't do more, or I get bored."This methodology cuts to the central, inescapable truth about quizzing: it's about knowledge.

"It is like buying tickets for a lottery. The more lottery tickets you have, the more chance there is of winning." He has friends who have gone so far as memorizing every Trivial Pursuit question (see box on page 153). "It might seem like that is trying too hard, and a little sad, but that's the way you do it."

It is this dedication to increasing his number of lottery tickets-extending even to German chancellors-that has enabled Olav to make quizzing not just his hobby but his career. In his day job he is a quiz setter for television and The Times of London. But the talent became lucrative long before he found formal employment.

"I did pub quizzes when I was sixteen or seventeen. We bought one drink all night and had people chasing us out of the pub after we won three or four nights in a row." At university he was cleverer, and went to a selection of pubs. "We made $235 a week. You can't do it on your own, though-I would feel slightly resentful of my friends making money off me. But that's what friends are for, I suppose."

Indeed. And perhaps they earned it in other ways. Because, to further paraphrase Johnson, his friends.h.i.+ps are in a constant state of disrepair. "I realize I do mentally delete a lot of everyday information-stuff about friends and their lives," he says, "in favor of quiz facts."

There is only one way to guarantee victory at Trivial Pursuit: learn every single answer. And actually, says Ed Cooke, a memory grandmaster, that's not as ridiculous a proposition as it sounds.

A typical Trivial Pursuit game has 400 cards, each with questions in six categories. "Each of these is a paired fact," says Cooke, who now runs a website, Memrise, that applies memory techniques to education. The first fact is in the question, the second is in the answer. "To learn them, you first need to visually link the question to the answer."

He chooses a question at random as an example. And, given the visualization that will follow, it is worth emphasizing this really was chosen at random. "Q: What punk group did Handsome d.i.c.k Manitoba sing for?" The answer? As I'm sure you all know, "The Dictators."

"The thing is to form a good image to link one side to the other. Dictator is easy-imagine adictator onstage." Hitler, for instance. Next, you have to have Hitler doing something that relates to the question. "You have to link Hitler to . . .??

Handsome d.i.c.k."

Once you have done this, and I think we can all agree there are several options, it is time for the hard work. "Then you are in the business of testing." This is not just about repeating "Dictators, Handsome d.i.c.k Manitoba." It is about being asked the question and actively recalling both the image and the answer. "This hugely strengthens the technique."

Finally, you repeat the process. "Go through it again in an hour, then that night, then next week.

The s.p.a.ces get bigger with time and it is really efficient-you are reviewing your knowledge just before it is about to drop from memory."

How long should all this take? There are 2,400 questions. a.s.suming you have a reasonable level of general knowledge and know a third of them already, if you take an hour a day on the rest, split into chunks, Ed thinks you would be ready in a month.

Consider it an Advent penance, before a well-earned Christmas Day triumph.DIPLOMACYWHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT?

Do you find that Monopoly is all too brief? Does a game of Scrabble with extended family do too little to foment deep and lasting antipathy, even when you keep overruling other players' words with references to the Oxford English Dictionary? Well, how about a game based on preWorld War I Europe that is even more likely to produce bitter and endless stalemate than that conflict, and that actively encourages shafting your friends and family? Excellent. Diplomacy is for you.

HOW DO YOU PLAY?.

Not that diplomatically, to be honest. A little like Risk, but with none of the elements of chance, it is about the total military domination of Europe. There are no dice here; all you have is cunning and guile. Each move takes 15 minutes and requires negotiating with, or lying to, the other players. If you want to take the Dardanelles without suffering your own Gallipoli, just like in real life you are going to have to woo-or deceive-the Ottoman Empire.

HOW DOES IT END?.

It'll all be over by Christmas. Probably.

a.n.a.lYSIS.

"Sometimes, in diplomacy," says Simon Rofe, lecturer in diplomacy at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, "you have to talk to really unpleasant people."

The British government sat down with the IRA. Israel signed the Camp David accords with the PLO. The Afghan government negotiated with the Taliban. And, come 1:00 a.m., amid stalemate on the Franco-German border and despite the fact that the dirty, underhanded cheater pulled a fast one on you in the Gulf of Bothnia, it could be time to call a summit with your sniveling uncle Charles.

Simon likes to use Diplomacy (the game) to teach diplomacy (the subject). Its chief virtue, he says, is that it rarely ends. "In some senses that is the quintessential thing about it," he says. While many might question the purpose of a game that almost never yields a victor, Simon says it demonstrates an important point. "Cardinal Richelieu established the French foreign ministry, and he did so on thebasis of negotiation continuelle. You can't just have a war, have a peace conference, then not speak to people for the next hundred years. You need someone in situ, to represent the head of state and be able to further your interests continually."

Even for the stronger nations, Diplomacy teaches the value of keeping on good terms with everyone. Otherwise, "You can win the battle but lose the war.

"Someone can clearly be in a position of power. That doesn't mean Belgium does not have influence. The game can bite you if you overlook the small players. If you just concentrate in one direction you can easily be ganged up on, lose your base, and find yourself traipsing around Europe like Hannibal.

"I've seen the game played skilfully by people who just want to maintain a position on the board.

They move around Benelux. They might lose Luxembourg, gain southern Belgium-for them, longevity is the quality, and to overlook them means someone else might bring them on their side. You don't want to be isolated, even if you are the biggest player. Otherwise you end up in the US position, being a unipolar power without friends."

To avoid this scenario means understanding the art of negotiation, even with people you distrust.

"You don't have to like each other," says Simon. "What you need to know is where his interests lie, and where yours are. Previous form makes a difference. Have you got a track record of being victorious, or trustworthy? Do you do things when you say you will? Have you said you will attack and done it? Have you said you will negotiate all the way but done an underhanded deal instead?"

If so, if you are in the position where trust is irrevocably lost between you, that is when you need an intermediary-a Jimmy Carter figure. "Have you been able to engender friends elsewhere? I may not trust you, might never trust you, but if we share a friend we can still do a one-off deal-a bilateral trade."

And once you've convinced Uncle Charles to do that, that's when you can do a secret deal with your credulous cousin Matthew and wrest back control of the Gulf of Bothnia.

In high-level diplomatic negotiations, one should never underestimate the importance of baser human needs. In particular, of sandwiches.

In the mid-1970s, Sir Christopher Meyer, former British amba.s.sador to Was.h.i.+ngton, longtime Diplomacy fan, was part of a delegation to Moscow. His team's job was to thrash out a communique over the weekend that the respective leaders could release on Monday.

"We were invited by the Russians to begin negotiations after a nice lunch at the hotel," he says.

To him, it sounded like an excellent suggestion. More experienced hands suspected something was afoot. "My friend said, 'They're up to no good.'?" Just in case, he got the emba.s.sy kitchen to make them some sandwiches, which they hid in their diplomatic bag."We arrived and they said, 'Before we have lunch, let's do a bit of work.' My friend looked at me and said, 'Here we go.'?" Of course, lunch never came.

"They thought we'd crack by tea."

They had not reckoned on the diplomatic bag. "At three p.m. Julian said to me, 'Get the sandwiches out.' We started chomping merrily on ham sandwiches. The guy on the other side was a survivor of the siege of Stalingrad. He smiled, he had a sense of humor.

"The negotiations went into the next day. But they were saved by sandwiches."

So while the future of Europe, or at least the fantasy Europe in your game of Diplomacy, may seem to depend on the complex web of alliances between the central powers, in reality it may have more to do with whether your opponent is hungry-or, equally likely, drunk. It was an important lesson for Sir Christopher to take into his other diplomatic work-the work that took place in a dacha just outside Moscow.

"The emba.s.sy had a country house." As well as being part of visiting delegations to Moscow, he was also stationed there for a time. "During the dark winters I would rent it for a weekend, go down there with eight or nine friends, and play Diplomacy." The games would go on until late on Friday night, then continue for most of Sat.u.r.day until "by three a.m., usually, the game would have collapsed." If it didn't, they resumed on Sunday.

As one of a vanis.h.i.+ngly small group of people to have successfully completed a game, Sir Christopher believes he has spotted useful patterns.

"Certain countries always won: they tended to be big. Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Russia. The fringe countries were Turkey and Britain. Turkey used to mimic real history-it would penetrate the Balkans, get into Austria, and be pushed out again."

Nevertheless, Sir Christopher, a patriot, tended to choose to play as poor weakened Blighty. "I always had great hopes for a BritishTurkish alliance, with a pincer movement on the other countries. There was usually a betrayal by one, or both, though: they would go off with someone else."

So it was that, despite one of the stellar diplomatic careers of the twentieth century, he admits he did not have similar success in the board game version. "I loved it, I loved the game. But the corollary between playing it and doing it is not that great," he says. "In the real world, alas, I never got the ability to offer people bits of territory or declare war."SANDCASTLESWHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT?

In medieval times, the castle was a home and a refuge-but also a symbol of power. The most elaborate of all rose from the desert sands of Arabia: Crusader forts that kept whole nations in check.

These days, rising from the sands, a new breed of castle-just as elaborate, if a little less robust against catapults-keeps beachside compet.i.tion in check. Can you construct the finest sandcastle and see off other would-be seaside fiefdoms?

HOW DO YOU PLAY?.

Look at a picture of Krak des Chevaliers, or Carnaervon. Fill your bucket and get to work. End up with a small mound. Exclaim loudly that you are pleasantly surprised with the way your motte and bailey has turned out.

HOW DOES IT END?.

With high tide.

a.n.a.lYSIS.

Most people get it wrong from the beginning, because the first mistake, when building a sandcastle, is to use a bucket. "The sand just doesn't come out. It's airlocked," says Matt Long, a professional sand sculptor.

Anyone who has carefully packed a bucket then turned it upside down will know the feeling. The sand forms a vacuum with the base, and stays stuck on by suction. So you shake and you prod and you tease, and you bash an upside-down bucket with a spade, and even before your sandcastle has begun you have undermined its structural integrity.

Instead of the sort of imposing late-medieval crenellations and formidable drawbridge that will see off the puny castles of your beach compet.i.tors, you end up with something that would shame a moderately ambitious Iron Age chieftain.

The solution is simple, says Matt. Take a bucket and "cut the bottom off." When he builds sandcastles, he makes constructions so big that they would not do that badly as real castles. He packs the sand in tight and uses lots of water and, crucially, he does so in situ. In that way, rather than having to turn your bucket upside down and then coax out the sand, you just pull the sides up and reveal a perfectly bonded shape, already attached to the ground below.

Matt, admittedly, uses large wooden sides to make his molds rather than red plastic buckets with the bottom chopped off, but for those not building 12,125-pound, 17-foot-high fortresses (a recentconstruction) he has an alternative suggestion.

"Take a big paint pot, remove the bottom, stand it on ground, pack it with sand and water, and slide up the sides-then you have a block of sand to cut," says Matt. Get some successively smaller paint pots and you could even build a tower, one on top of the other. "That's the very basic way to create elevation in sand. Because that's where the drama is-to make sand do what's not expected of sand.

When sand is standing up two, three, ten feet, that's when it gets dramatic."

And what if your sand does not stand up that high, whatever you do? Well, it might not be your fault: different sands can have varying qualities. "With some sands you can carve out seven feet of sheer wall. With others, you are lucky if you get ten inches." The best sands are quartz crystal, because the individual grains lock together. The worst sands are desert sands-worn and ground down into spheres by millennia of erosion. In the Middle East you can't even use the beach sand in the construction industry. When Matt sculpts there, they have to s.h.i.+p in his sand from abroad.

Once you have a block of sand standing on its own, all that remains is to take away the bits of sand that aren't castle. Matt's tip, one surprisingly frequently ignored, is to "always, always" start at the top and work your way down. Otherwise your finely crafted arrow slits will find themselves crumbling from the sand tumbling from above.

Oh, and finally, lest you think it is time to branch out from medieval fortifications, Matt's advice is: don't. Michelangelo didn't say, after David, "That's enough of perfectly honed marble bottoms and asymmetric t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es, I'm going to try something more avant-garde." The Polynesians of Easter Island never thought, "Maybe our small island is full up, as regards stylized stone heads?" No, they knew their market. So it is with sand.

"Sometimes," says Matt, "I carve something artistic. Always, I find people say, 'What is it?' I reply, 'It's art, dammit.'?" Then, resigned, he goes back to castles. "Everyone understands a castle."

The sandcastle created by Maryam Pakpour is not, at least conventionally, impressive. There are no battlements or arrow slits, nothing in the way of decoration-and not even a moat. Yet, for her paper in Nature' s Scientific Reports, the Iranian scientist has constructed something so outlandish that at first you a.s.sume it must be Photoshopped.

Her sandcastle is 60 centimeters (almost two feet) high-impressive, but not notable. What marks it out, though, is it is only seven centimeters (not quite three inches) wide. Amongsandcastle enthusiasts it is-and one doesn't use such a phrase lightly in the dynamic world of beach sculpting-a paradigm s.h.i.+ft. An Ancient Egyptian, comfortable with the idea that buildings can be high, but only if they are also wide, would doubtless experience the same shock on seeing a modern skysc.r.a.per.

Maryam's tower stands unsupported, impossibly erect. Less a castle it is more a lighthouse, beaming a clear message to all beachside sandcastle compet.i.tion: this is a new kind of sand sculpture. It also beams a clear message to physicists-whether or not they are beachside compet.i.tion. Because such a sandcastle should not be possible.

Conventional physics had it that a straight-sided sandcastle could not exceed much more than 20 centimeters (seven inches) in height. Having visited a beach, Maryam concluded this estimate was "in stark disagreement" with what physicists like to call "reality." What was going on?

She and her colleagues re-estimated the theoretical limits of sand towers, accounting for their ability to bond using "capillary bridges." For the same reason that water forms a meniscus, climbing up the sides of a container using surface tension, it also creeps between grains and pulls them together. "This then creates a network of grains connected by pendular bridges and allows, for example, creating complex structures such as sandcastles."

Maryam went back through the equations and came to a conclusion that better matched what actually happens on beaches. Instead of a theoretical upper limit, she worked out the relations.h.i.+p between minimum base diameter and maximum height. In theory, according to her calculations, a cylinder of sand 20 centimeters in diameter could reach a height of 2.5 meters (8.2 feet). But what about practice?

In one of the more unusual "methods" sections of a Nature paper, Maryam described how to turn the equations into reality.

"Cylindrical 'sandcastles' were constructed using non-wetting PVC pipes of different diameters cut in half over the length of the tube. The two halves were a.s.sembled, and the wet sand was put in the tube standing vertically on a surface." It was then compacted by bas.h.i.+ng vigorously on the top. "This process was repeated until the pipe was filled with sand up to a certain height. The two halves of the cylindrical tube were then carefully removed."

Maryam beheld her creation and, her paper recounts, realized she "had the recipe for the perfect sandcastle."

It was a single symmetrical tower, pointing to the sun while, around its base, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretched away. Look on her works, ye sandcastle builders, and despair.STONE SKIPPINGWHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT?

A life led by desire, said Kierkegaard, is like "a stone skipping across the waters that skips the surface of the abyss only to sink to the depths the moment it pauses in its flight." What, though, if what you desire in life is to skip stones? What if you get so good at it they can bounce dozens of times and amaze onlookers? That suddenly sounds like rather a good life. Even Kierkegaard might be cheered by that.

HOW DO YOU PLAY?.

Carefully select a rock. Throw the rock. Watch it bounce once then crash into the waves. Blame the rock.

HOW DOES IT END?.

No matter how high the spin or how fast the throw, stone skipping, like political careers, must end in failure-eventually everything disappears noiselessly beneath the water. Maybe Kierkegaard had a point after all.

a.n.a.lYSIS.

One day in 2000, Kurt Steiner came across a small article in a newspaper advertising a stone- skipping contest. He showed it to his wife. "I said, 'I used to be pretty good at that.'?"

Kurt had grown up near the sh.o.r.es of Lake Erie, where, for hundreds of miles of coastline, eons of geological time has ground the stones into perfectly rounded disks, perfect for skipping. "Anyone who lives there just does it naturally."

"My wife said, 'Then let's do it.'?" Kurt had a condition, though. First, they would have to get Erie rocks, from 100 miles away. "I'm a purist with rocks. I had to get those rocks, and haul them all the way to the compet.i.tion." She agreed, and Kurt and his Erie rocks won the amateur event.

There are two responses to this story. The first is to note that if there was an amateur event, that implies there was also a professional one-for stone skipping. There was. The second is to query how Kurt found such an amenable wife.