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Comment by smky80 | Hacker News Reader

As much as I recognize and appreciate the limitations of chess, it pains me physically to see the strategic depth of it compared to something like Starcraft. It's not close by orders of magnitude.

I still remember some important match almost 15 years ago between two world class Starcraft players, who also apparently were friends off the board, being settled in 3 minutes by one guy "4 pooling" (basically sucker punching) the other.

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A 4 pool isn't a sucker punch. It is a highly risky opening strategy that almost always ends the game very quickly. If your opponent does not scout it quickly, he is very likely to lose. If he does, you are very likely to lose. The existence of this early all-in option does much to "keep players honest" during the opening phases of the game and greatly expands the strategic depth of the beginning minutes. Without this option, each player's optimal strategy would always be to sacrifice defense and scouting early in favor of better late-game economy.

> a highly risky opening strategy that almost always ends the game very quickly

In other words, a sucker punch?

I think parent was reading sucker punch (as I did) as not "risky", but unfair -- as you can't see it coming (by definition).

In SC2, 6pooling is certainly quite powerful (Zerg makes Tassadar cry...) but if it is scouted, the Zerg is now fucked.

The thing is, in the current meta, you never bother drone/probe/scv scouting that early, so you'd have to be able to read your opponent and know that he's a kind of player that loves those "Cheesy" build orders!

Like girvo said, I meant that it's not unfair. If you think surprise attacks and imperfect information don't add strategic depth to a game, then we have nothing left to discuss.

It's not to say Starcraft isn't a challenging game or there isn't any depth to it, but I am saying if 4 pooling is considered deep stuff, you have to realize that something like chess is on a completely different level.

I'm quite sure you could put all you would ever need to know about Starcraft strategy into a single 300 page volume, whereas there are entire libraries full of chess books, databases of millions of games and 3300-rated computers slugging it out constantly, and the game still hasn't been completely exhausted yet.

Look, I'm not even disagreeing with you. I never said StarCraft is as deep strategically as Chess is. I think Chess is certainly more strategic. I also happen to think StarCraft is a much more interesting game because it has tactical, psychological, and physical aspects totally absent in Chess. These statements are not incompatible.

The only issue I took with your original post was that you seemed to be claiming that 4 pool openings made the game less strategic when in fact the opposite is true. It's a common mistake made by people who do not understand the game.

Well certainly individual preference is a matter of taste. For me, "4 pooling" and these kind of largely random rock-paper-scissors choices -- which can often be decisive, as is the case here -- put me off Starcraft and a lot of games in general, at least as anything more than casual entertainment. But I do remember enjoying the game before I yelling at kids to get off my lawn.

Tell that to Taeja, the "I'll go 3 command centre before rax if I wanna" Terran player ;)

I love Taeja so much.

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