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Comment by JTBooth | Hacker News Reader

After which the second player has a guaranteed route to win, but it's much harder to find! Last I checked the game tree was computed up to a 6x7 board, players usually use 13x13

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I used to play it quite a bit with a friend back in my student days, on a 12×12 board. We were aware, in principle, that the first player had a winning strategy, but in practice, the advantage to the first player was small enough to hardly be detectable (though we did not compile any statistics on it). Perhaps this only serves to reveal that we weren't terribly good at it, though. We weren't aware of the swap rule at the time.

That's slightly surprising since playing in the middle of the board on your first move is such a large advantage.

Beginner players do seem to think that playing near a black side is a good opening, but it's actually one of the weakest, but playing it "quite a bit" I would suspect you would stumble on playing near the middle by accident if nothing else?

Oh, it took us very little time to figure out to start in the middle. It took us more time to figure out what was the most effective response to that. It is hard to remember now, as I haven’t played the game in decades. But most likely, both of us made just enough mistakes, which the other then exploited, that the initial advantaged drowned in the noise of what followed, if you get my drift.

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